Risk and boundaries
"Risk-free" here means no directional price risk. It does not mean no risk at all. Separating the two is worth more than a blanket assurance of safety.
The part of the risk that is removed, and the part that is not
Removed: price direction
The two legs run opposite each other at matched notional, so their P&L is a mirror image. Bitcoin can fall thirty percent in a day and the combined position barely moves, because it was never betting on direction. The difference in notional between the legs is reported separately as an opening residual, in currency rather than as a percentage.
Remains: funding decays or turns negative
The rate is set by market sentiment. It drifts toward zero in flat and bear markets and turns negative in extreme stretches. ETHUSDT returned 7.873% across all of 2022 for exactly that reason. Returns thin out, but principal is not damaged by direction.
Remains: exchange and extreme conditions
Exchange downtime, contract rule changes and liquidity drying up during a violent wick are outside what the strategy can remove. What the system can do is set thresholds, reduce positions automatically and raise alerts. What it cannot do is stand behind the exchange.
Remains: the other side of the principal multiple
The same multiple that scales funding income also scales cost and volatility. When the rate turns negative, what is paid out scales with it; and as the margin ratio approaches maintenance the system reduces the position, which itself thins that period's income.
Platform credit risk: what custody buys, and what it costs
Once funds are custodied in a dedicated platform account, the 7% floor on the capital-and-yield-protected plan and the principal guarantee on the plans that carry one are both honoured by the platform, so both carry platform credit risk. What the strategy removes is directional price risk; it cannot remove the question of whether the counterparty is still there. These are two separate things, stated together rather than hidden by layout.
One number can actually be checked: the solvency ratio
Platform funds available against liabilities committed, recorded once a day by an end-of-day job, with the last 30 days plotted against the threshold line on the same chart. When it breaches the threshold the overview page raises an alert rather than waiting for someone to notice. It is not a quarterly disclosure; it is a curve that moves every day — and it is the one indicator this page suggests watching.
The worst numbers, put here
Full-year return in the worst year (ETHUSDT, 2022)
Not removed from the same table
The principal multiple scales cost and volatility too
What gets paid out when funding turns negative scales with it
Exchange currently integrated in depth
Concentrated on a single venue, whose downtime and rule changes affect every position
Risk disclosure
Figures above are a historical back-test of funding rates recorded period by period, as of 2026-08-25. They describe how funding behaved under past market conditions, are not a forecast of future returns, and are not investment advice. Averages cover only the 5 complete years (2021–2025) that can be verified settlement by settlement; 2026, 2020 remain in the table but are excluded from the average. Funding tracks market sentiment: positive periods are frequent and rich in bull markets, and fall sharply in flat or bear markets — ETHUSDT returned just 7.873% across 2022. The strategy removes directional price risk. It does not remove exchange risk, contract-rule changes, or liquidity and execution risk in extreme conditions.
See the year-by-year recordOpen an account to see period-by-period detail