Equity Perp Funding Rates: Reading the First Hyperliquid Heatmap (NVDA, TSLA)

Equity perp funding rates are the hourly payments that keep tokenized-stock perpetuals, like NVDA and TSLA, pinned to their reference price on Hyperliquid's HIP-3 markets. They settle every hour, all 168 hours of the week, even when the US stock market is closed. The twist most people miss: when equities close, the oracle freezes the last real-market print, and funding keeps accruing against that stale reference until the market reopens. That freeze is the reason this heatmap exists.

Why this dataset exists at all

Equity perps on Hyperliquid's HIP-3 (builder-deployed) markets settle funding hourly. During US market hours, the oracle tracks the live equity price. When the market closes, it doesn't switch to a synthetic feed, it freezes the last real print and funding accrues against that frozen number until Monday.

That gives 168 observations a week per name, spanning open hours, overnight, and the weekend stretch where the token trades against a price that hasn't moved since Friday's close. To be precise about the uniqueness claim: Binance and Bitget both list stock perps, so equity perps themselves aren't new. What's specific here is that no major CEX equity perp settles funding hourly across all 168 hours against a frozen-print oracle the way HIP-3 markets do.

What we measured

Data pulled August 3, 2026, a 14-day trailing window, 336 hourly observations per name.

• TSLA: +9.9% (longs pay shorts). Weekday funding (+10.3%) runs richer than weekend (+8.7%).
• AMZN: +7.1% (longs pay). Unusually, weekend funding (+8.3%) runs richer than weekday (+6.6%), the opposite pattern from TSLA.
• MSFT: +6.2% (longs pay). Nearly flat between weekday (+6.2%) and weekend (+6.3%).
• NVDA: +5.8% (longs pay). Weekday +6.1%, weekend +4.9%.
• AAPL: -2.5% (shorts pay overall), still the outlier of the set. It flips by day type: negative on weekdays (-5.2%) but positive on weekends (+4.2%).

Sign-flip frequency (14-day window): AAPL flips most often at 51 times, MSFT next at 43, NVDA at 29, TSLA at 24, AMZN least at 20.

A pattern that showed up across names, not just one: NVDA, TSLA, and AMZN each hit their single most positive funding hour of the whole window at the same time, Sunday 03:00 UTC. Three unrelated equities peaking at the identical hour isn't a coincidence you'd expect from company-specific news, it points to something structural in how funding resets right as the week's first Asia session opens after the weekend freeze.

Why a trader should care

Funding is the price of holding a leveraged view. If that price has a weekly rhythm, entries have a cheap hour and an expensive hour, and cash-and-carry trades (long the spot wrapper, short the perp) earn differently depending on when in the week the position runs. A single snapshot shows the carry. The heatmap shows when in the week that carry actually accrues, including the closed-market hours where the frozen print does the work.

FAQ

What are equity perp funding rates?

Periodic payments exchanged between long and short holders of a tokenized-equity perpetual, sized to keep the perp price anchored to a reference price. On Hyperliquid's HIP-3 equity markets, funding settles hourly, producing 168 observations per week.

When the perp trades above the reference, funding is positive and longs pay shorts. When it trades below, funding is negative and shorts pay longs. The sign can flip through the week, and it behaves differently during frozen-print, market-closed hours than during live US hours.

Hyperliquid's framework for builder-deployed perpetual markets: third parties can permissionlessly deploy their own perps with their own parameters. The equity perps studied here were deployed by TradeXYZ, the perp arm of Unit (Hyperunit).

Methodology

Data source: Hyperliquid's public info API, fundingHistory method, hourly settles, 14 days ending August 3, 2026 (336 observations per name). Markets are HIP-3 builder-deployed by TradeXYZ; funding parameters are set per deployer. On-chain ticker convention confirmed: the API's coin parameter uses the xyz: prefix, for example xyz:NVDA, xyz:TSLA, xyz:AAPL, xyz:AMZN, xyz:MSFT.

This is research, not advice. A future edition will refresh this same grid after the next earnings season, so that effect gets its own look.

App at Fensory.com.