Crypto Derivatives Data: Perpetuals, Futures, Funding, and Open Interest
The schema and validation rules needed to research perpetual and dated crypto contracts without mixing unlike markets.
Crypto derivatives data describes perpetual swaps, dated futures, options, and related reference series. Research-grade coverage keeps the exchange, contract identity, underlying, quote and settlement assets, expiry, multiplier, price and quantity units, trades, mark and index prices, funding, open interest, liquidations, timestamps, and gap states separate. Spot candles alone cannot reproduce derivatives behavior.
Model the contract before the observation
A perpetual has no expiry but usually has recurring funding. A dated future expires and may roll into another contract. Linear and inverse contracts express quantity and PnL differently.
Preserve native venue identifiers and specifications, then create versioned normalized fields. Never join contracts only because their display symbols share an underlying.
Keep reference series distinct
Last trade, mark price, index price, funding rate, basis, and open interest answer different questions. Liquidation models and venue controls may reference mark price rather than the last trade.
Each series needs its own event time, publication cadence, units, history window, and coverage state. Funding and open-interest snapshots should not be silently forward-filled across missing observations.
- Contract and settlement specification
- Trade, mark, and index prices
- Funding interval and realized rate
- Open interest units
- Liquidation event semantics
- Expiry and roll history
State current availability honestly
DataCedar serves the dynamic Binance USDⓈ-M derivative catalog and source-labeled one-minute bars, including separately classified crypto and TradFi-linked perpetuals.
The current contract does not imply options, permanent trade/order-book archives, funding, mark/index, open-interest, liquidation, or deep pre-capture derivative history. Each remains an explicit coverage gap rather than being inferred from Spot bars.
How DataCedar preserves the evidence
DataCedar separates acquisition from serving. Permitted source responses are retained with retrieval time and identifiers, normalized into DataCedar-owned tables, checked against expected coverage, and exposed through a stable versioned API. A collector can be replaced without changing the customer contract or making an upstream provider a runtime dependency.
Every research stream carries effective and known-at time where the distinction matters. Rights-restricted, unavailable, partial, stale, and genuinely empty states remain visible, so a backtest can fail closed and a buyer can see the product boundary before committing engineering time.
Key takeaways
- 01Derivatives require contract-aware identity and units.
- 02Do not collapse trade, mark, index, funding, and open interest.
- 03Preserve expiry, roll, and catalog history.
- 04DataCedar currently serves Binance perpetual identity and one-minute bars; richer derivative series remain explicit gaps.