How you earn
Where the yield comes from, why it exists, and when it stops.
Funding, in plain words
On Hyperliquid people trade perpetual futures: bets on a coin's price that never expire. Most traders bet on prices going up, often with borrowed money. That pushes the futures price above the real price.
To pull the two back together, the exchange makes the crowded side pay the other side every hour. That payment is funding. When more people bet on up, the people betting on up pay the people betting on down.
NullPoint always sits on the paid side: it bets on down (a short). On its own a short would lose money when the price rises, so the vault also holds the same amount of the coin. The two cancel. Funding is what's left.
How much
It moves with the market. On Hyperliquid mainnet, BTC funding has mostly run between 5% and 15% a year, with spikes higher. The dashboard shows the live rate for each coin, and the landing page shows a 30-day simulation on real Hyperliquid data.
Only part of your money earns it. About two thirds buys the coin and one third is collateral for the short, so a 9% funding rate on the short works out to roughly 6% a year on the whole deposit, before fees.
Where you see it
You hold shares. The vault's total value divided by all shares is the share price. When funding arrives, the vault's value rises and so does the share price. Your number of shares doesn't change; each one is worth a bit more.
The contract records the share price on a schedule (every 10 minutes on testnet, every 30 on mainnet), and the dashboard charts it.
When it stops
- Funding turns negative. Then shorts pay instead of earning. The agent switches to a coin that still pays, or sells everything and waits in USDC (this is called parking). Some weeks the vault earns nothing.
- Switching coins costs money, about 0.4% of what's moved. The agent only switches when the extra funding pays that back within a week. See AI strategist and limits.
Why a coin and a short, and not just a short
A short alone would be a bet that prices fall. Holding the coin as well makes the position delta-neutral: the vault's value doesn't depend on the price. People call this a basis trade. Funds run it all the time, usually with their own exchange keys, and you trust the fund. Here the exchange account belongs to a smart contract, and the bot that trades can't take the money out. Security model explains how.