🔥 Fu Peng: Large investors become “landlords,” retail traders pay rent through leveraged trading

On April 25, Fu Peng, Chief Economist of Xinhuo Group, published a post on the X platform dissecting Bitcoin’s underlying logic. He pointed out that the business models of Bitcoin perpetual contracts and ETFs are essentially the same as traditional finance’s “deferred fees/overnight fees”: large investors collect rent from long-term positions, while retail traders use leverage to go long and pay for it, and platforms indirectly skim off the fees. Large-scale spot holders are not simply going long—by combining long-term holdings with hedging operations, they collect the funding rate, continuously lowering their position costs, and ultimately achieve “zero cost or even negative cost.” Fu Peng emphasized that the premium/discount on CME Bitcoin futures is precisely the pricing of these holding costs. He believes that Bitcoin has evolved from an emotion-driven speculative product into a mature asset with structural positive returns, with large investors and platforms as long-term beneficiaries—and retail traders’ leverage enthusiasm is, in essence, “paying rent.”
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