The “Kimchi” Premium of Perps
Today, we’re launching spread markets on Boros, starting with the ETH and BTC spreads, allowing users to long or short the funding rate gap between venues…
Today, we’re launching spread markets on Boros, starting with the ETH and BTC spreads, allowing users to long or short the funding rate gap between venues with a single position.
Building Boros from the ground up means the team has spent more time observing and obsessing over funding rates than anyone. We’ve seen the same gap in funding rates show up in crypto over and over again, and history has convinced us that this will be the next big trade.
The Next Trillion Dollar Trade
The most iconic trades of past cycles have centred on capturing huge inefficiencies across markets.
Arthur Hayes physically arbitraged Bitcoin between Hong Kong and mainland China, buying BTC on Mt. Gox and ferrying it across the border to sell at a 20–40% premium. A few years later, SBF ran the same idea on the “Kimchi Premium”, moving millions of dollars between Japan and Korea, with Alameda making up to $1M a day at the peak.
Buy low, sell high. What makes this trade so powerful is how simple, repeatable, and infallible it is:
- Hayes and SBF were early. Few people knew the premiums existed, and even fewer had the know-how to execute them. Thus, early movers pocketed the biggest rewards with almost no competition.
- These inefficiencies were consistent and structural. The same trade could be repeated day after day and compounded as long as the gap was there.
- The risk was clear. The main thing that could go wrong was the premium narrowing. With so few competitors, the margins stayed high.
Every trader today would give anything to catch the same premiums, but they closed long ago.
Now the same opportunity lives on in perp funding rates.
Perps have become the default way to trade crypto, with volume far outpacing spots in every market regime. Crypto did around $85 trillion in perp volume last year and is on pace to surpass it in 2026.
You’re still early.
The New “Kimchi” Premium
Every perp venue charges funding, and every venue calculates it with its own formula. Hyperliquid, Binance, Lighter, Gate… all of them can pay different rates on the same assets at the same time.
Boros, as a funding rate market, lets you trade this — whether that’s speculating directionally, hedging your funding rate payments, or pairing Boros positions with your perp positions to earn a fixed yield.
Our spread markets take this to the next stage, isolating the gap between two perp markets and turning it into a single yield-bearing, tradeable asset.
In short, it creates an infinite money glitch for both longs and shorts.
Shorts can profit from high fixed yields via funding rate arbitrage (~25–35%), while longs can repeatedly harvest 30% returns or more over a 30d period via funding rate settlements:
With both sides winning, this creates a yield flywheel on Boros that has the potential to capture the entire crypto perp space:
Spread markets create a unique PVE arena where traders and arbitrageurs work in tandem to profit from their respective trades. It’s a positive-sum game for all, with Boros being the underlying infrastructure that creates these yield opportunities.
You can learn more about Boros spread markets and how to trade them in detail from our Academy here.
A Second Shot
If you could go back in time to do what they did, would you?
Hayes needed an RMB bank account and countless trips across the border. SBF needed a global web of corporate setups, battling bureaucracy to move millions of dollars a day. Every trader wishes in hindsight they had caught the last premium before it closed. But without foresight and expertise, these can only ever remain hypothetical “what ifs”.
Spread markets simplify and democratize the same kind of premium, this time in funding rates.
So would you go back in time? Time to find out.
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Further reading
Capturing ~25–30% Fixed APR with Boros:
Consistent 20% return every 25 days via longing funding rate spreads: