While real-time rates are crucial for immediate decisions, historical data provides invaluable strategic context. It allows you to identify long-term trends, understand an asset's typical borrowing cost, and avoid making decisions based on short-term volatility. Analyzing past rates is essential for backtesting strategies, forecasting potential costs for long-term positions, and identifying assets that offer consistently high yields for lending.

The rate shown in the table is the cumulative interest cost over the selected period. It is the sum of all the daily interest rates for that duration. This figure represents the total percentage of the borrowed amount you would have paid in interest if you had held the position for the entire period.

Example: If the daily borrow rate for BTC was 0.01% ㅤfor 30 days, the cumulative interest rate displayed would be approximately 0.30% ㅤ(0.01% * 30).

• Margin Traders (Borrowers): Estimate the long-term cost of holding a leveraged short or long position. A high and stable historical rate for an asset might make a long-term short or long unprofitable.
• Crypto Lenders: Identify which assets have historically offered the highest and most stable borrowing rates. This helps in choosing the most profitable assets to lend for passive income.
• Arbitrageurs: Backtest the 'long futures, short spot' strategy. By comparing the historical cumulative borrow cost with the historical cumulative funding rate received, you can determine if the strategy would have been profitable over a given period.

They represent two different market mechanisms:

• Historical Margin Rates this page show the past cost of borrowing capital in the spot market's lending pool. It's a classic supply-demand interest rate.
• Historical Funding Rates show the past payments exchanged between long and short positions in the futures market. It's a mechanism to keep the futures price pegged to the spot price, not a borrowing cost.

Both are essential for backtesting the full cost and profit of a futures-spot arbitrage strategy.

The interest rate is purely driven by supply and demand. Stablecoins like USDT often have relatively low and stable rates because there is a large supply available for lending. More volatile or newer altcoins might have very high rates because the supply available for borrowing is low, while the demand from traders wanting to short them is high.