You don’t even know who decides the contract price, what are you talking about here?

$ATA Let me share my understanding of this trading technique.
First of all, why can this coin rise so ridiculously? Because the operators control at least 90% of the coins in the market. They use a method called wash trading to drive up the price. For example, with two accounts, assuming the current price is 1 yuan, if one account has 1 million coins, the operator buys 1 million coins from the other account for 1.2 million, the price changes to 1.2 yuan. The coins are still in the hands of the operator, and they only spent 200,000 to drive the price up. This is like inflating the price out of thin air; if retail investors follow and buy, the operator's cost will be even lower.
Then why is the funding rate so absurdly negative at -3%? I personally believe that shorting contracts involves borrowing coins to sell them in the market and then buying them back to return to others when the price drops. So when there are too few coins circulating in the market, too many short sellers, and the price is too high, the interest on borrowed coins will be very high. Of course, I may misunderstand the mechanism of short selling in futures here.
Finally, if you short, you must bear the floating loss from the price increase and the loss from the funding rate. If you want to profit from the funding rate by going long, the price will immediately drop significantly at that moment, and the losses from the price drop will exceed the gains from the funding rate.
The first time I saw this trading technique was at the end of 2023 with TRB; on that New Year's Eve, TRB rose from over a hundred to over six hundred. After that, many coins replicated this trading technique, but many people still fell for it. However, there are those who made money, very few, most people still got tricked.