Cost to Hold · No. 0002 · Wednesday 12 August 2026 · four minutes
July CPI landed at 08:30 and barely moved the price. It moved the cost of holding a position by six percentage points on one venue and not at all on another. Also today: solana funding inverted across two exchanges overnight, and a note on the one number your exchange will never print.
A tenth of a point on CPI took six points off the cost of holding bitcoin
Inflation cooled by a tenth. Prices rose 0.1% on the month and 3.4% on the year, down from 3.5% — still ahead of wage growth at 3.2%, with energy the stubborn part as the war with Iran drags on. NBC News · Fox Business
Bitcoin's response was to do essentially nothing: $64,086, down 0.33% over twenty-four hours. Ether managed +1.20%, solana +0.92%. If you were watching price, that was a quiet morning.
Underneath it, the cost of carrying the same position moved hard, and in different directions depending where you held it. Against yesterday's capture, annualised bitcoin funding went:
- OKX 9.49% → 3.42% — six points off
- Binance 9.16% → 6.89% — two and a quarter off
- Bybit 4.14% → 5.53% — one and a half on
- Hyperliquid 10.95% → 10.95% — unchanged to the basis point
Same asset, same thirty-one minutes after the same print, four different answers about what it costs to be long.
This is the connection worth holding onto: funding is partly a financing rate. A perpetual has no expiry, so the mechanism that keeps it tethered to spot has to price the cost of money, which means an inflation print reaches your carry whether or not it reaches the price. Nothing about the chart told you a six-point annualised repricing had happened on OKX. The chart is not where it shows up.
The Hyperliquid line is the one I would not skip past. It did not move because it is sitting exactly on the 0.01%-per-8h baseline — the default rate — and has been for both bitcoin and ether since yesterday. That is not the market agreeing with itself. It is a number that has stopped carrying information, which looks identical to a stable number until you check what it is pinned to.
If you are long bitcoin perp today, the venue you happened to pick this morning is worth about six percentage points annualised. Nobody sent you a notification about it.
Also today
Solana funding inverted across two venues overnight. Yesterday Binance was paying longs at −2.11% annualised while Bybit charged them +1.74%. Today it is the exact reverse: Binance +3.83%, Bybit −3.63%. Both flipped sign inside twenty-four hours, on the same asset, while spot moved less than a percent. Add Hyperliquid at +1.34% and OKX at −3.84% and all four venues currently disagree about which side of solana is crowded. There is no version of that where more than one of them is right, and the difference is real money either way.
Positioning is drifting toward Hyperliquid. Open interest rose there across all three assets — bitcoin +3.3%, ether +5.6%, solana +2.9% — while OKX fell on all three, ether −1.7% and solana −5.4%. One session is not a trend and I am not calling it one. But the venue gaining position is also the venue whose funding has stopped moving, and those two facts sitting together are worth another few days of watching.
What nobody has to tell you. In Europe a broker selling contracts for difference is legally required to print a number on its own marketing: the percentage of its retail accounts that lost money, recalculated every quarter across the preceding twelve months. It is why those banners read "74% of retail investor accounts lose money when trading CFDs with this provider." The figure is firm-specific, and ESMA's own analysis of the sector put the range at 74% to 89%, with average losses per client between €1,600 and €29,000. ESMA · FCA
A crypto exchange offering fifty-times leverage on a perpetual is required to print nothing at all. Same leverage, same retail buyer, same distribution of outcomes — one regime forces the number into the banner, the other never asks for it.
Nobody had to decide to hide it. Computing an honest, fee- and funding-inclusive return for every account costs engineering time and earns the venue nothing; worse, the number most likely to help you is the number most likely to make you stop. It never reaches the top of a roadmap owned by people whose revenue is volume. That is the same shape as the retention windows: every party measures the slice that serves them, and your outcome is not anybody's slice.
The tape
Captured 09:01 ET, thirty-one minutes after the print.
Price and 24h change
| BTC | ETH | SOL | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mark | $64,086 |
$1,909.70 |
$76.53 |
| 24h | −0.33% |
+1.20% |
+0.92% |
Funding, per 8h and annualised
| BTC | ETH | SOL | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hyperliquid | +0.0100% · 10.95% |
+0.0100% · 10.95% |
+0.0012% · 1.34% |
| Binance | +0.0063% · 6.89% |
+0.0097% · 10.67% |
+0.0035% · 3.83% |
| OKX | +0.0031% · 3.42% |
+0.0038% · 4.20% |
−0.0035% · −3.84% |
| Bybit | +0.0050% · 5.53% |
+0.0062% · 6.80% |
−0.0033% · −3.63% |
Hyperliquid settles funding hourly; its rate is shown multiplied by eight so the column compares. Binance and Bybit are read from CoinGecko rather than directly, and their interval is assumed to be 8h — see the venue note below.
Open interest, basis, and 24h change
| BTC | ETH | SOL | |
|---|---|---|---|
| OI, Hyperliquid | $2.47B +3.3% |
$1.67B +5.6% |
$0.39B +2.9% |
| OI, Binance | $6.89B +1.0% |
$4.41B −0.4% |
$0.66B −0.1% |
| OI, OKX | $2.04B −2.5% |
$1.32B −1.7% |
$0.22B −5.4% |
| OI, Bybit | $3.69B +0.2% |
$1.41B −2.1% |
$0.50B +0.2% |
| Basis, Hyperliquid | −4.5 bps |
−2.3 bps |
−4.4 bps |
| Basis, OKX | −4.1 bps |
−3.2 bps |
−6.5 bps |
The 24h open-interest column exists from today, because yesterday's snapshot now exists to difference against. Liquidations are still omitted — no free venue endpoint serves a 24h total.
Captured 2026-08-12 13:01 UTC · raw snapshot
Venue watch. Binance returns HTTP 451 and Bybit returns HTTP 403 to
direct requests from this location — geographic blocks, not outages, and no
hostname gets around either. Their columns are filled from CoinGecko and marked
as such, so the coverage gate records this issue as degraded: two venues
first-party, two second-hand.
One question
Has any venue you trade on ever shown you what percentage of its users make money? Has any of them ever shown you what percentage you make, after funding and fees? Reply and say. I will publish what comes back, without names.
The cost corner
The window is measured in fills on at least one major venue, not in months — the last 10,000, and everything before that is gone from the exchange itself.
The Founder No. 01 — Your exchange is deleting your trading history
Not investment advice. Nothing here predicts anything. Numbers are pulled from venue APIs at the time stamped above and may be revised. Third-party figures are linked to their sources.
Written by Joe DeFeo from inside a live systematic book.
Provenance
Captured 2026-08-12T13:01:01Z
Venues 4 of 4 reachable
Gates DEGRADED · 3 flags
Snapshot /daily/2026-08-12/data.json — append-only, never edited
- coverage: 2 of 4 venues read first-party. Binance and Bybit are filled from CoinGecko and labelled in the tape.
- third-party funding interval assumed 8h — Binance and Bybit move some contracts to 4h at the funding cap, and the feed does not say which.
- liquidations unavailable — no free venue endpoint serves a 24h total.
Every number above can be checked against that file. If one is later revised the correction runs here and at the top of the next issue — the snapshot itself is never rewritten.