Funding and the mark price

Perpetual futures on other venues stay tethered to a spot index by a funding rate: longs pay shorts, or the reverse, every few hours, and that recurring cost is what stops the contract drifting away from the underlying.

That is not a configuration you have switched off. There is nothing to switch on. Everything below explains what the product does have, so you neither promise funding to traders nor go looking for a setting that does not exist.

What the rate in the ticket is

The trading ticket can show a Funding Rate row, and market rows in the markets panel can show a small percentage with a trailing asterisk. Both come from one place: an optional fundingRate value on the market's own metadata JSON.

• It is a static number you type into the market, not something the engine computes, and not something any feed updates.
• It is reference only. The UI labels it as such, and the settlement countdown that used to sit beside it is gone — a countdown to a settlement that never happens is a promise the engine does not keep.
• If the market has no fundingRate, the row renders nothing at all. Absent is deliberately kept absent; a zero would render as a permanent green 0.0000% on every market and read as a real rate of zero.
• A genuine 0 is shown, because zero is a meaningful value to publish.

The futures ticker itself does not carry a funding rate. Nothing in the futures engine reads the field.

The same field is the source for the Hummingbot connector's perpetual funding rate endpoint and its fundingRate stream channel, if you run that addon — so if you publish a number, a connected bot will read it as the venue's rate.

Where the mark price comes from

Everything that marks a position — unrealised PnL, stop loss, take profit, liquidation, and the price a manual close settles at — uses one number: the last traded price of your own market, held in the matching engine's in-memory ticker.

• It is derived from your candles and your prints. There is no external index and no basket of reference exchanges.
• The close endpoint falls back to the entry price — so, zero PnL — when the engine has no price at all. That is the only honest answer when nothing has ever traded.
• The mark sweep skips any symbol whose last is zero. A market that has never printed would otherwise read as a 100% adverse move and liquidate every position on it at once.

Two operational consequences follow.

A thin market marks itself. One print at an absurd price becomes the mark for every position on that symbol until the next print. With a stop loss, a take profit and a liquidation threshold all reading that number, a single wash trade on an illiquid contract can close positions across the whole book. Amount and price limits in the market's metadata are your only defence — set them.

A market with no depth cannot liquidate cleanly. Liquidations are placed as real orders against your book. Where there is nothing resting, a full liquidation falls back to mark settlement and books a shortfall against the platform. See Liquidation.

Running perpetuals without funding

Be clear-eyed about what you are operating.

• Nothing pulls the contract back to spot. With no funding leg and no expiry, the futures price on your book is whatever your own order flow makes it. It can sit at a persistent premium or discount for as long as traders want it to.
• Holding is free. A crowded one-way book has no cost to being crowded. On a venue with funding, a heavily long book gets expensive to stay long in; here it does not, so skew persists — which is exactly what the side skew panel on the risk console exists to show you.
• Your exposure is the imbalance. You are the counterparty to every position. A perfectly balanced book nets out; a book that is 80% long against your quote currency is a directional position you did not choose to take.

If you want to discourage one-sided books, the levers you actually have are fee rates (which are per market and per side of the liquidity, not per direction), the leverage rungs you publish, and the amount and cost limits on the market. None of them is a funding rate, and none of them adjusts itself.

What to tell traders

Three lines is usually enough, and all three are verifiable from the product:

1. Contracts are perpetual: no expiry, no settlement date, no roll.
2. No funding is charged or paid. A position costs the opening fee and nothing else to hold.
3. Positions are marked against this venue's own last traded price, not an external index.

That third line is the one traders most need, because it changes how they should size a position on a thin market.