Funding Rate Gaps Now Mainstream in Crypto

What Boros actually launched

Perpetual futures are derivatives with no expiry date, and they use periodic “funding” payments between long and short traders to keep contract prices tethered to the underlying asset. Those funding rates float. They also differ from one exchange to the next, sometimes by a meaningful margin. Before this launch, capturing that spread could require multiple transactions and separate collateral commitments on each leg. Boros’s new spread markets package the gap into a single tradeable instrument. Traders take a view on whether the funding difference between, say, Hyperliquid and Gate on ETH will widen or narrow, without building the whole structure by hand.

The numbers behind the trade

Boros did not arrive at spread markets from a standing start. The protocol already ran single-venue funding-rate markets built around a product called Yield Units, or YUs. YUs let traders convert a floating funding rate into a fixed implied APR.

The pitch is simple

Instead of juggling several positions to capture the gap between two exchanges, traders can now hold one position that represents the gap itself.

What this means for traders and the derivatives market

If the spread between two venues is directly tradeable, the strategy becomes available to traders who never had the setup to run a 4-leg arbitrage. The launch is anticipated to bring more liquidity and trading efficiency to crypto derivatives.

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A screenshot of the Boros dashboard displaying the new spread markets, with a prominent display of the funding rate gap between Hyperliquid and Gate on ETH, and a trader's position represented as a single tradeable instrument.