Bitcoin cash and carry

Checked October 2026

Cash-and-carry harvests the funding payment on a bitcoin perpetual by holding the coin against a short perpetual. Coinbase's quantitative research desk described the strategy in 2022. Backtoast could not run it, because it needs a long and a short at the same time.

Backtoast

You pay $99 for two full tests of your own strategy, and a pass is an offer of 30% of the profit Backtoast makes trading it with its own money.

Bitcoin cash and carry

Funding is the regular payment between longs and shorts that keeps the perpetual near the coin, and when the perpetual trades above it, the shorts get paid. The trade buys bitcoin, shorts the same amount of the perpetual, holds both and collects that payment, with no signal and no rebalancing.

Backtoast can't hold the coin and the short perpetual as one hedged position, so either leg alone would be a bet on bitcoin's price.

Perpetual versus spot opens and closes the same hedge on a signal, when the gap is wider than the fees.

When it works

Cash-and-carry earns the most in bull markets, when traders pay up for leveraged longs and funding runs high. The yield shrinks as funding falls toward zero, and funding becomes a cost when it turns negative and the shorts pay. It's market-neutral, so funds and trading desks run it as a yield trade.

Origins

Coinbase's write-up from July 2022 shows about 40% over a hold of about a year on FTX data, with longer holds giving higher yearly returns. It gives no dates, fees or leverage for that figure.

Backtoast did not run this one.