Futures Contract

A futures contract fixes today the price of a transaction that settles later. Buy the March BTC future at $65,000 and you've locked a $65,000 purchase price for March, whatever spot does in between.

Futures vs spot

You post margin rather than the full notional, which makes futures inherently levered instruments. Dated futures also settle on a fixed date (quarterly, in crypto's case), unlike perpetuals, which roll forever via funding. And shorting is native: selling a future is as easy as buying one, which is what makes hedged constructions like cash-and-carry possible.

The price relationship

A future's price F floats around spot S, and the difference is the basis. Because the two must converge at expiry (a March future is BTC in March), the basis decays predictably to zero. That decay is the mechanism basis-harvesting strategies monetize, and the reason futures pricing is about interest and sentiment rather than a separate opinion on the asset.

On AlphaProve

The instruments you can backtest here are Bybit linear perpetual futures, USDT-settled, so it's the funding-rolled branch above, not dated quarterly expiry, that your strategies actually trade. Because they are margined instruments, the engine simulates leverage, cross or isolated margin, and a modeled liquidation price, and it charges the perp funding that keeps the contract tethered to spot. Strategy code can read the current rate through latest_funding_rate to time entries around funding, and a catalog endpoint lists which symbol and timeframe pairs actually have history to test.