I am observing a strange trading anomaly on the MEXC exchange. The ESPORTSUSDT perpetual futures contract is trading at almost two and a half times lower than the ESPORTS token on the spot market.
I have checked everything carefully.
The order book shows that:
* many market participants are actually willing to sell the futures contract at more than two times lower than the current market price of the token. There are sell limit orders for the futures contract, and there are quite a lot of them.
* at the same time, many market participants are actually willing to buy the token at more than two times higher than the futures price. There are also quite a lot of buy limit orders.
The recent trades feed shows that trading at these prices is really taking place. Trades are happening regularly both on spot and on perpetual futures.
The charts show that this anomaly has been persisting for quite a long time.
How can this happen? What is the reason for such a huge difference between the spot price and the perpetual futures price?
And the strangest thing is the funding rate. When a perpetual futures contract on a token is trading so much lower than the token itself on the spot market, the funding rate should be sharply negative, so that arbitrageurs start opening long positions and bring the futures price back in line with the token price. But on MEXC, the funding rate remains positive!
Does anyone understand what is actually going on?
