How Hyperliquid funding works
Funding is the mechanism that keeps a perpetual contract anchored to the spot price. On Hyperliquid it is exchanged every hour, which is the detail most traders coming from other venues get wrong.
Who pays whom
When the perpetual trades above the spot index, longs pay shorts. When it trades below, shorts pay longs. The rate is proportional to the premium, so a crowded trade becomes progressively more expensive to hold.
The sign tells you where the crowd is. A persistently positive rate on a market means longs are paying to stay long — which is information about positioning, not a prediction.
Hourly, not eight-hourly
Most venues settle funding three times a day. Hyperliquid settles 24 times. The headline rate is usually quoted as an 8-hour equivalent for comparison, but the cash actually moves every hour.
The practical consequence: a position opened and closed within an hour may pay nothing, while one held over a weekend pays 48 times.
What it costs in practice
At an 8-hour rate of 0.01 %, a $100,000 long pays about $30 a day, or $900 over a month. That is frequently larger than every trading fee on the position combined.
This is why a wallet can look profitable on realized PnL and be flat on net. Any honest analysis separates the two.