Rate Spread
Rate Spread places a row of tiered funding offers across a price range instead of betting on a single rate. The cheapest tiers fill fast; the priciest ones sit and wait to catch a spike. It is an Intermediate, Rate spread–category strategy: one of the strategies you can run on an allocation bucket inside a currency strategy.
How it works
Rate Spread spreads its bucket's slice of capital across several offers evenly spaced between two multiples of FRR —
Bitfinex's Flash Return Rate, the platform's average funding rate. The cheapest offer is placed at
FRR × loMult and the priciest at FRR × hiMult, with the remaining tiers spaced evenly in
between. The slice's capital is divided evenly across the tiers, so each offer carries the same amount.
Low tiers fill quickly because they undercut the market; high tiers rest above it and only fill if the rate climbs to meet them. That way you catch a range of rates rather than committing everything at one price. All offers in the spread use the bucket's configured loan length (period).
When to use it
Reach for Rate Spread when you want to catch a range of rates instead of betting on one price. It sits between the hands-off Simple FRR baseline and the more reactive maturity- and event-driven strategies: you stay broadly in the market (the low tiers keep filling) while still keeping some capital reaching for higher rates.
The tradeoff
The cheap offers earn little, and the pricey ones may never fill. The spacing is fixed, so it ignores how volatile the market actually is — in a calm market the high tiers can sit idle, and in a choppy one a fixed spread can be too timid or too greedy. If you want the spread to widen and tighten with volatility automatically, look at Adaptive Spread, which uses the same tier-ladder idea but adjusts its width as the rate gets choppy or calm.
Parameters
- Number of offers (
slices) — how many offers to place across the price range. Default5; clamped to between2and20. More offers cover more rates, but each one is smaller. - Cheapest offer (
loMult) — your most aggressive offer, as a multiple of FRR. Default0.5(half the market rate), which fills almost instantly. Lower fills faster but earns less. - Priciest offer (
hiMult) — your highest, most patient offer, as a multiple of FRR. Default2.0(twice the market rate), which only fills if the rate spikes. Higher reaches for spikes but may sit unfilled.
Return and liquidity profile
In the product's strategy picker, Rate Spread is rated medium return and high liquidity — the low tiers keep capital filling and turning over, while the high tiers reach for more without parking cash idle the way a reserve-and-wait strategy does.
How it runs
Rate Spread is a pure, deterministic function: given its slice of capital and a market snapshot, it returns the set of offers it wants to rest. The same algorithm code runs in live ticks and in backtests, with the strategy orchestrator handling allocation, global floors and caps, and reconciling the live order book to the target offers. Strategies place offers through your scoped Bitfinex API key — see Add your Bitfinex API key and the security overview for how keys are scoped and stored.
About the modeled figures
You can backtest Rate Spread against real historical Bitfinex funding data in the calculator and in-app. Backtests run the same algorithm code but are explicitly optimistic — they assume full-size fills and ignore order-book depth and market impact — so any figure they produce is modeled, not a guarantee. 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.