Hyperliquid Cross-Sectional Funding-Carry, Dollar-Neutral Long-Short Basket (8 Liquid HL Perps, 4H Rebalance, LONG the Most-Negative-Funding Names + SHORT the Most-Positive-Funding Names, Harvest Funding on BOTH Legs, Low-Parameter)

A DOLLAR-NEUTRAL, LONG-SHORT cross-sectional CARRY book on Hyperliquid perpetuals that harvests the FUNDING cross-section rather than making any price forecast. Each rebalance it ranks a fixed universe of ~8 liquid HL perps by their recent realized funding and goes LONG the two names paying the most NEGATIVE funding (you are PAID hourly to hold the long) while SHORTING the two names charging the most POSITIVE funding (you are PAID hourly to hold the short), in equal dollar notional so net delta ~0. This fills the three most-violated quota dimensions at once: HYPERLIQUID venue (7.3% vs a >=20% target — the largest venue gap), non-long-only direction (long_only is 84.1% vs a <=55% cap; this is genuinely market-neutral), and multi-instrument scope. It is DISTINCT from the pipeline's NegativeFundingCarryLongBasket5Perps4H (that is LONG-ONLY negative-funding on 5 perps) because this harvests BOTH funding tails with a dollar-neutral short leg, and DISTINCT from the two HL cross-sectional PRICE baskets already in pipeline (momentum, short-term-reversal) because the ranking variable is FUNDING, not return. CRITICALLY it is NOT the failed directional funding-contrarian bets: those took a single-asset DIRECTIONAL position betting funding would revert the PRICE; this takes NO price view, collects funding as a mechanical cash flow on both legs, and cancels market beta — so there is no BTC/ETH buy-hold benchmark to lose to (structurally sidestepping the negative-information-ratio finding that sank every prior funding hypothesis). It is also NOT the failed microscopic CM-vs-USD-M spread: HL funding DISPERSION across names (retail crowds specific perps) is routinely 0.01-0.05%/hr wide between the top and bottom of the cross-section — 0.24-1.2%/day of combined two-leg carry — one to two orders of magnitude above the ~0.18%-per-leg round-trip cost. Runs on 4H bars deliberately (HL's ~5000-candle API limit gives 4H ~2.3 years of usable history; a 1h/15m version would be abandoned for insufficient history). Low-parameter (universe fixed, 4 knobs) and funding lookups are O(1) via incrementally-maintained rolling accumulators — never re-scanning the funding series per bar, the exact pattern behind five recent Layer-3 timeouts.