Quarterly Expiry

Crypto exchanges list dated futures that settle on a quarterly calendar, conventionally the last Friday of March, June, September, and December. A "BTCUSDT 27 June" contract ceases to exist that day: positions settle at the official settlement price, pinned to spot.

Why the date matters to pricing

Expiry is the anchor that forces the future's price to converge to spot. At settlement, F = S by definition, and before that the basis (F − S) shrinks roughly linearly as time runs out. The fixed timetable is what makes annualizing the basis meaningful: the net annualized basis divides the remaining premium by the days left.

Trading around the calendar

At any moment several expiries trade at once (the front quarter, the next, sometimes two more), each with its own basis. Carry traders scan the curve for the richest annualized premium, hold to settlement, then roll into the next opportunity. For a cash-and-carry strategy, the expiry calendar isn't a settlement detail. It's the clock: entries are priced off it, exits happen on it, and returns are measured against it.

On AlphaProve

Nothing on AlphaProve expires. The tradable universe is Bybit perpetuals, so there is no settlement calendar and no convergence clock in the engine; the periodic cash-flow event that stands in for expiry is the funding interval, which the cost model applies as a position crosses each funding timestamp. In place of an expiry ladder the platform gives you depth of history across twelve timeframes from 1m to 1d, aggregated to higher timeframes on the fly with no lookahead, so a perpetual strategy is measured against a continuous series rather than a dated one.