The 10.95% Equity Longs Bleed: How 0% Base Interest on BitMEX Equity Perps Can Help

TL;DR

• The Problem: Most exchanges hard-code a ~10.95% base interest rate into their Equity Perps offerings. You pay this even if the market is flat and the premium is zero.

• The Fix: BitMEX Equity Perps use a 0% Base Interest Rate. You only pay for genuine market premium.

• The Play: Move long-term long positions to BitMEX to save + 11% APY, or use BitMEX as the "cheap leg" to hedge airdrop farms on new Perp DEXs.

If you’ve been trading Equity Perps — NVDA, TSLA, or MSTR, you might be leaking profit without realising it. It’s not slippage, and it’s not commission. It’s the structure of the instrument itself.

In today’s article, we analyse the funding formulas across major equity perps venues. The majority still use legacy "high base interest" that was invented by BitMEX for crypto perps in the first place. Now, a new "zero base interest" structure was launched by BitMEX. This eliminates the risk of holding positions for more than a few days and being on the wrong side of this split, which can cost you double-digit interest payments annually.

Why You're Down 10.95% Before You Start

Most exchanges simply copy-pasted the perpetual swap logic from 2016 and applied it to their stocks offerings. This formula includes a fixed Interest Rate Component of 0.01% every 8 hours.

In the crypto world, that doesn't sound like much. But for stable and mature assets like stocks, annualised 10.95% is a high interest that is unnecessary.

This creates a structural drag. Even if the price of a stock stays perfectly flat, your PnL bleeds out ~11% a year just to keep the Long position open assuming the perpetual contract has no premium. You are effectively paying a "tax" on your own conviction by trading Equity Perps. It forces you to overcome an 11% hurdle rate before you even break even on the trade.

The BitMEX Upgrade: Zero Interest

On 8 January 2026, we launched our Equity Perps with a single, critical change: with a Base Interest Rate of 0%.

We stripped out the artificial floor. Our formula is simple: Funding = Premium + 0%.

This means our funding rate is purely a reflection of market sentiment (Price vs. Spot). If the market isn't overheated, your cost to hold is zero. You get the pure exposure to the asset without the structural bleed.

The Backtest: How BitMEX Saves Your PnL

We ran the numbers on popular tickers over a 30-day period on trade.xyz to identify how much "yield drag" a trader can suffer on competitor exchanges versus the clean exposure on BitMEX.

The difference isn't theoretical—it’s money left on the table.

Taking TSLA as an example – despite the stock rallying 9.23%, the 11.33% funding tax rate on other platforms eats your entire profit and pushes you into a loss. Despite correctly predicting the market direction, you still lose money (-2.1%) because of the venue you chose. On BitMEX, that 9.23% profit is yours to keep.

The situation is even worse in stagnant positions like CRCL. The price was essentially flat (down only 3.1%) – a manageable scratch trade. But on a competitor venue, the massive 16.14% fee drag turned a minor dip into a -19.24% crash. You didn't lose that money to the market; you lost it to the exchange's formula.

Put Zero Interest to Good Use — Funding Arbitrage & Airdrop Farming

Besides trading the equity on leverage with zero base interest, another good way to utilise BitMEX Equity Perps is to do funding rate arbitrage and airdrop farming.

In the current market, liquidity often flows into new decentralised exchanges (DEXs) that reward traders with "Points" ahead of a Token Generation Event (TGE). The standard strategy to farm these points is a simple "Basis Trade": you Short on the DEX to earn volume/Open Interest points, and you Long on another exchange to stay Delta Neutral.

BitMEX Equity Perps offer a more efficient way to structure this hedge. Because our Base Interest Rate is 0%, you remove the default interest component from your Long leg.

1. Short on the Pre-TGE DEX: You open a Short position to farm volume and OI points. Because the DEX likely uses the legacy formula with the 11% anchor, Shorts are structurally positioned to receive funding (collecting the tax that Longs are forced to pay).

2. Long on BitMEX: You hedge your delta by going Long on BitMEX. Because our base interest rate is 0%, you pay near-zero costs to maintain this hedge.

The Result: You are now Delta Neutral, but instead of paying to maintain the position, you are capturing the spread. You collect the positive funding from the DEX, pay zero on BitMEX, and accumulate airdrop points for free. This turns "Airdrop Farming" from a capital-draining expense into a sustainable, yield-generating strategy that you can run for months.

Conclusion

Trading is difficult enough without fighting the exchange's own math. The "Interest Rate Anchor" used by our competitors is an outdated mechanic that functions as a hidden tax on every Long position.

By switching to BitMEX Equity Perps, you eliminate this friction entirely. Whether you are holding a position like TSLA for the long term and want to keep your 9% profit instead of losing it to fees, or you are executing a sophisticated cash-and-carry arb to farm the next big DEX airdrop, the logic is undeniable.

Stop paying rent on your own trades. Trade Equity Perps with 0% interest on BitMEX here.