Spot vs. Futures

In spot trading, you buy the actual coin and it's yours. You can hold it, move it to a wallet, or sell it later. Your gain or loss is simply the difference between what you paid and what it's worth.

In futures trading, you never own the coin. You hold a contract that tracks its price, and you settle the difference in cash (USDT, on the perpetuals CoinLAB follows). It's a bet on the price, not a claim on the asset.

Picture the difference between buying a house and betting on house prices. Buy the house (spot) and you own a thing — you can live in it and sell it whenever. Bet on house prices (futures) and you own no house at all; you simply profit or lose as the market moves, in either direction, often with leverage.

That's the core trade-off. Spot is simpler and you hold something real. Futures add two-way bets, leverage, and — for perpetuals — no expiry, at the cost of more moving parts and more risk.

Because futures positions are contracts with a long and a short on every side, they generate signals that spot markets simply don't have: funding rates, open interest, long/short ratios, and liquidations. Spot has none of these — you either own the coin or you don't.

That richness is exactly why the futures market is the one worth reading. Funding, open interest, positioning, taker flow — all of it comes from the activity these contracts produce.

Every number on CoinLAB is drawn from Binance USDT-M perpetual futures, not spot. So when the data shows the crowd leaning long or funding running hot, it's describing how futures traders are positioned — the leveraged, two-sided market — rather than people simply holding coins.

Neither market is "the real one"; they move together and inform each other. But futures positioning is where the sentiment data lives — which is why it's the futures market these readings describe.