Funding rate has been negative for 66 consecutive days, yet Bitcoin still rose to around $81k, with institutional hedging as the main reason.

Recently, some funds in the market may be using a strategy of shorting Bitcoin (especially perpetual contracts) while going long on crypto-related stocks (such as Coinbase, MicroStrategy, Circle Internet Group) to capture the excess returns of these stocks relative to Bitcoin, and simultaneously profit from funding rates or structural arbitrage opportunities.

Reason for negative funding rates: BTC has been rising steadily, but funding remains long-term negative.
The market may be showing:

An institutional relative value trade of shorting BTC contracts
and going long on MSTR.

Using MSTR's excess beta over BTC, US stock liquidity, and sentiment premiums, to hedge major directional risks while capturing structural spreads. It's not risk-free arbitrage, but it could be one of the recent low-risk, high-efficiency capital structures in the market.

The above is a reasonable plan derived after chatting with AI, mainly because recently everyone has been thinking that regardless of BTC's price increase, funding rates are still negative, and news reports indicate that funding rates have been negative for 67 days in a row, yet Bitcoin still rose to around $81k, with institutional hedging as the main reason.