The Crypto Basis Trade and Cash-and-Carry

This lesson covers the basis trade, one of the largest institutional strategies in crypto. The basis is simply the gap between the spot price of an asset and the price of a future on it, and the cash-and-carry trade captures that gap while hedging out price risk entirely. We build it from an everyday buy-now-sell-later example, work through the profit in numbers for a dated future, then show the perpetual version that harvests the funding rate from the last lesson. This is the trade that absorbs much of the capital on institutional crypto desks, and it is a clean window into how an interviewer probes whether you really understand arbitrage.