Your margin is silently slipping away, the candlestick chart remains still, but your account balance is shrinking at an accelerated pace. This is not alarmist talk, but the real scenario unfolding every moment in the futures market.

In the current altcoin futures market, the era of violent fluctuations with sharp rises and falls is over. What is the truly brutal harvesting method? It’s the funding rate. An hourly 2% vampire-like fee has become the new favorite of the market makers. They manipulate the market to keep the price range-bound for a long time, while continuously harvesting participants under the guise of holding positions. You think you are strategically positioning or chasing the rally, but in reality, you have become a "fee rate ATM" bred by the market makers, being drained little by little while the price remains almost static.

This raises a question: Is there a way to completely escape this systemic exploitation? The answer points to stablecoins. The significance of stablecoins like USDD is not only in price stability itself but also in breaking the fee rate trap of the futures market. By holding or switching to stablecoin assets, you can shift from being a passive victim of harvesting to an active participant, regaining full control over your assets.

What is the principle behind the funding rate? In theory, it is a balancing mechanism designed for perpetual contracts to keep the trading price anchored to the spot price—both longs and shorts pay each other fees, and the rate should be relatively moderate. But in practice, in highly controlled contract markets, market makers turn this mechanism into a precise vampire tool. By manipulating the contract settlement cycle (compressing it from the usual 8 hours to 1 hour) and artificially inflating the rate, they turn what seems to be a reasonable balancing system into a naked harvesting machine.

In such a market environment, stablecoins are not only a hedging tool but also a survival rule. They provide participants with an exit from the fee rate hell.