#流动性激励与收益 The idea on the back seat of a Shanghai taxi in 2015 now seems like a watershed moment. What Ben Delo realized at that moment was far more profound than perpetual contracts themselves — he touched the essence of liquidity pricing.

The question at the time seemed simple: why must futures have an expiration date? Traders hated the hassle of rollovers. But the real insight was deeper — separating interest rates from asset prices, allowing the market to self-price liquidity costs through dynamic funding rates. How clever is this mechanism? It solves in pure market force what traditional finance took decades to figure out.

I've been wondering why this concept was born in the crypto market and not on Wall Street. The answer is quite ironic: precisely because there are no central banks, no bureaucratic systems, and no multitude of stakeholders to coordinate. In the absence of central design, a more elegant mechanism evolved. Funding rates adapt to market deviations; short sellers enter to arbitrage at high rates, pulling prices back. It’s a perfect negative feedback loop.

But that’s also the problem. Transparency becomes its Achilles’ heel. When the funding rate of perpetual contracts exposes the cost of dollar liquidity in the open, how panicked do traditional financial institutions that are used to pricing in the dark become? LIBOR was once notorious for manipulation, yet this naturally evolved system in crypto eliminates the space for human interference through a fully transparent mathematical mechanism. It’s as ironic as irony gets.

This is not just a story about a trading tool, but a fracture in the financial architecture. One system quietly grows in the shadow of official finance, settling trillions of dollars daily, yet almost never enters the view of central bank officials. The deeper implication hits harder: if the funding rate of perpetual contracts remains high above policy rates for long periods, it means the real cost of offshore dollars is slipping out of the Fed’s control.

History is always this ironic. We once thought transparency in regulation was a good thing; now, this very transparency has become what some vested interests fear most.