Fade crowded perpetual funding on BTCUSDT (Binance USD-M futures). Core signal: when 8h funding turns sharply negative (shorts crowded / paying longs), go LONG BTC and hold ~24-72h for the short-squeeze mean-reversion bounce. Empirical basis: 6.5yr Binance backtest of 7,162 funding events shows a monotone contrarian relationship — corr(funding, next-24h return) = -0.028; funding <= -0.02% (n=53) yields +2.87% net-of-fee 24h return with a 71.7% win rate, and funding <= -0.01% (n=159) yields +1.44% net at 63.5% win. Symmetric short-side variant: fade positive funding spikes (>= +0.05%), the only bucket with negative forward returns (-0.16% median 24h). Params to sweep: entry funding threshold (-0.01% to -0.05%), hold horizon (24/48/72h) vs exit-on-funding-normalization, and optional confirmation filter (price already down into the negative print). Long side routes to BINANCE USD-M futures with leverage>1 (funding-based edge); avg net trade return ~+1.4-2.9% clears the ~0.10% round-trip taker fee comfortably. Note extreme buckets are thin (n=12-53), so validate for robustness/overfitting on the 3-phase optimizer.