Measuring a Cardano perpetuals venue: volume, cross-venue price gaps, funding and maker markout on Strike Finance
Most of what we publish at The Cardano Record comes from our own cardano-db-sync node. This segment doesn't. Strike Finance is Cardano's perpetuals venue, and the numbers that describe how well it works as a market (volume, spread, funding, how it prices against other exchanges) aren't something you can read cleanly out of ledger tables. So this post covers a different kind of pipeline: one that…
Strike Finance is Cardano's perpetuals market, and the post examines various metrics to assess its performance. Perpetuals are futures contracts without expiration, and funding rates are periodic payments between longs and shorts to keep the perpetual's price close to the underlying asset.
The post introduces funding rates but points out their limitation: the feed carries the rate but no open interest or volume. So, additional data sources are added to provide more insights. Live traded volume per market, quoted bid/ask spread, and maker markout are fetched from Strike's public ticker and computed from a trade tape. The gap between Strike's mark price and contracts on OKX and Hyperliquid is also monitored every 20 minutes.
There are three key measures discussed: funding rates, markout, and maker spread. Funding rates indicate whether longs or shorts are receiving payments, with positive funding meaning longs pay shorts. Maker spread measures how much price moves against makers after their orders are filled, revealing if the spread is paying for losses. Markout measures price movement against makers at different time horizons, providing a stronger measure than spread alone.
The pipeline fetching these metrics has strict freshness requirements: 90 minutes for cross-venue data, 36 hours for markout reports, and 3 hours for funding feeds. If any input is stale, the pipeline will drop it instead of using an old figure.
Two data sources report different ADA funding figures (42.74% vs 42.97%), which is acceptable as they are sampled at different times. Market counts also differ due to the different time frames used. The post warns against misinterpreting annualized funding rates as yields, as they only describe the cost at a specific moment.
Finally, the post provides snapshot data as of 2026-10-12 12:17 UTC. The share percentage shows the pipeline's contribution to market data. Dollar figures are rounded for clarity.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
