Glossary
Basis Trade
A delta-neutral strategy that captures the funding-rate or futures-basis spread — long spot, short the perpetual or future against it, hedging away price risk.
A basis trade isolates the funding rate (perpetuals) or the spot-vs-futures basis (term futures). The trader holds the spot asset, shorts an equivalent amount of perpetual or futures, and pockets the spread regardless of which way the underlying moves.
Crypto basis trades are large and persistent: positive perp funding for months at a time has been the structural reward of holding spot ETH or BTC long against an exchange-traded perp. Ethena's USDe productizes the trade as a stablecoin, abstracting the on-exchange operations into a single tokenized position.