Maturity Ladder
Maturity Ladder is a maturity-aware funding strategy for Bitfinex margin lending. It spreads a bucket's capital evenly across several loan lengths so something is always maturing and coming back to reinvest — like a savings-CD ladder. It is rated Intermediate and is live in Stratum today.
In Stratum, a currency strategy is one container whose capital is split into allocation buckets, and each bucket runs a single algorithm on its slice. Maturity Ladder is one of those algorithms. For the full list and how to pick between them, see Strategies.
1. How it works
Maturity Ladder splits the bucket's slice evenly across several loan lengths (by default 2, 7, 14, and 30 days), so part of your capital is always maturing and returning to be re-lent. The capital is divided equally among the loan lengths you choose.
- Each loan length is priced from the per-tenor funding book when a funding curve is available.
- When no per-tenor curve is available (for example a cold start, or a backtest without per-tenor data), each offer falls back to FRR — Bitfinex's Flash Return Rate, the platform's average funding rate.
- The loan lengths you supply are constrained to Bitfinex's allowed range (2 to 120 days) and de-duplicated before offers are placed.
2. When to use it
Use Maturity Ladder when you want a steady drip of cash returning and partial flexibility without trying to time the rate. Shorter loan lengths free your cash sooner; longer ones lock in today's rate. Because money is divided equally across the ladder, you always have some capital maturing soon and some lent further out.
3. Tradeoffs
The ladder splits blindly by loan length: it divides capital evenly across the lengths you set and ignores which length is actually paying best right now. If you specifically want to lend where the term structure pays most, the Yield Curve strategy ranks loan lengths by rate instead of splitting evenly. As with all funding lending, loans can also return before their full term when borrowers repay early.
4. Settings
- Loan lengths (days) — the list of loan lengths to split your capital evenly across, in days. The default is
2 / 7 / 14 / 30. Each value is constrained to the 2–120 day range and duplicates are removed.
5. What to expect on returns
Maturity Ladder sits in the middle of the return and liquidity range: a medium return profile with medium liquidity, since some capital is always maturing soon and some is locked further out.
You can model any strategy against historical Bitfinex funding data on the calculator. Backtests run the exact same algorithm code that runs live, but they are modeled, not a guarantee, and are deliberately optimistic — they assume full-size fills and ignore order-book depth and market impact. Past performance does not predict future results. You are lending to margin traders and bear the credit risk of Bitfinex's collateral system; Stratum does not guarantee returns.
6. Get started
To run Maturity Ladder, first add a scoped Bitfinex API key — Stratum reads the key's real permissions and rejects any key with withdrawal or trading enabled, then encrypts it with AES-256-GCM. Keys are protected by TOTP two-factor authentication. See Security for details, then create a strategy and assign a bucket to Maturity Ladder. We recommend starting in paper mode before going live.