BTC: Binance Quarterly Futures Basis (Annualized)
The annualized premium of Binance's BTC coin-margined quarterly futures over Binance's index, for the current and the next quarterly contract, hour by hour since June 2020.
Why use it. The basis is the yield a trader locks in by buying the coin and selling the future, the cash-and-carry trade. It runs high when leveraged buyers pay up for exposure and falls toward zero or below when the market is fearful, so its long history puts today's reading against every rally and crash since 2020. How to read it. Each line is one contract, in percent a year. A rising line means buyers pay more to hold the coin through a future; near zero or below, futures trade at or under the index. The two lines usually move together, and the gap between them is the slope of the futures curve. The summary value is the nearest contract with at least seven days to expiry.
Calculation. Per hour, for each contract: (the close of Binance's continuous candle for the contract / the close of Binance's index candle for the same pair - 1) x 365 / days to expiry x 100, the rule of our cross-venue basis, kept only with at least seven days to expiry. Days to expiry run from the hour's close to the contract's delivery: Binance delivers its quarterlies on the last Friday of March, June, September and December at 08:00 UTC, so the current quarter is the first delivery at or after the hour's close and the next quarter the one after it. A day's value is its last hour's. Candle closes are last-trade prices; our cross-venue basis, from 14 October 2026, uses mark prices and every venue's dated contracts. Binance's first coin-margined quarterly (September 2020) was its current quarter from its listing, so the history starts after the June 2020 delivery. Source: Binance's public REST candles of its coin-margined quarterly futures (BTCUSD, current and next quarter) and of their index, read by CryptoKeyhole every ten minutes; served from June 2020 (the next quarter from July 2020).