With the Fed’s target range at 3.75% to 4.00%, the three-month U.S. Treasury bill was the benchmark for dollar-based crypto strategies, yielding 4.15% on October 26, 2026. From October 2025 to September 2026, funding on Binance’s BTCUSDT perpetual contract paid only 3.37%, compared with an average 3.77% for the Treasury bill, before fees and risks. A cash-and-carry trade on the December futures contract offered an annualized return of about 5.5% on October 27, but only 4.4% after accounting for a 25% margin, before execution costs. For a euro-based investor hedging the dollar, the roughly 1.7 percentage-point hedging cost brought the Treasury benchmark back down to about 2.5%, the ECB’s deposit rate. A Fed rate increase therefore raises the benchmark while reducing demand for leverage, whereas a cut may widen the premium available to dollar-neutral strategies.
Source: Read the original article
