Perpetual futures charge a small recurring payment called funding from whichever side of the trade is crowded — when funding turns sharply positive, leveraged buyers are paying to stay long, and vice versa. That number is a live census of positioning that Polymarket's short-dated up/down cycles do not price directly. You read funding and open interest across the big perp venues at the start of each cycle and lean against extreme crowding, because over-levered books tend to get flushed inside the hour.
Markets on Polymarket where perp funding-rate skew on hourly up/down cycles is the natural play:
