LITUSDT fundingRate archives contain post-delisting rows; REST omits old-contract history after ticker reuse

[zhaolixiang72-coder]

Summary

Could you clarify how to interpret the old Litentry LITUSDT funding-rate archives and retrieve that contract's REST history after the ticker was reused for Lighter?

The 2025-01 through 2025-06 monthly fundingRate ZIPs contain 417 rows after the announced removal of the old contract, all with a funding rate of 0.0001. The relevant REST queries return no old-contract rows. I have not assumed that an empty REST response proves there were no funding events.

Official contract timeline

• Binance announced automatic settlement/removal of the Litentry LITUSDT perpetual at 2025-01-31 09:00 UTC: official announcement.
• Binance later announced a Lighter Protocol LITUSDT pre-market perpetual starting 2025-12-23 17:30 UTC: official announcement.

These are different underlying assets sharing the same symbol.

Archive observations and integrity verification

Archive URL pattern:

https://data.binance.vision/data/futures/um/monthly/fundingRate/LITUSDT/LITUSDT-fundingRate-2025-MM.zip

The first post-removal row is 2025-01-31 16:00:00 UTC and the last is 2025-06-19 08:00:00.003 UTC. Counts below refer only to rows after the old contract's announced removal and before the new contract's launch.

On 2026-09-07 03:06 UTC, all six current official .zip.CHECKSUM endpoints returned HTTP 200, and their declared ZIP digests matched the actual downloaded ZIP bytes:

Month	Post-removal rows	ZIP SHA-256
2025-01	1	123947019f2f158cbec1578270b28654d82660bf0f4740958bb95bcc5286369a
2025-02	84	70428539456e476461fbe1993e4f9e5345008bebcbb12498c18f0b18a34ce2bf
2025-03	93	a11e684080dd5fe3cd69f315c40d4420bd510dd942896e5ebd4395441ea78138
2025-04	90	a1ab0ff7f1ebb3ba345a05e32c2b6b3a3caaf377ae8f109434fe42d74049c28a
2025-05	93	f4a834b5b308cc06d7306ec6a4fdd7eed1dc93ea8fbeb013e27792594f0590e7
2025-06	56	d5f6247ee879703a02e08afe0aa1f30bf3c0f8208537479631ace442c4612f80

All 417 rates are 0.0001. This may be consistent with continued placeholder generation, but I have not found an authoritative rule confirming that interpretation.

Minimal REST reproduction

Observed on 2026-09-07 around 02:49 UTC, using the public endpoint without an API key. Time bounds are inclusive Unix milliseconds. Requests were spaced at least three seconds apart.

1. Old-contract window immediately before the announced settlement:

curl -sS 'https://fapi.binance.com/fapi/v1/fundingRate?symbol=LITUSDT&startTime=1738281600000&endTime=1738310400000&limit=1000'

Observed response: [].

2. A 120-second window centered on the last old-era archive row:

curl -sS 'https://fapi.binance.com/fapi/v1/fundingRate?symbol=LITUSDT&startTime=1750319940003&endTime=1750320060003&limit=1000'

Observed response: [].

3. From that archived timestamp through the first new-contract funding timestamp:

curl -sS 'https://fapi.binance.com/fapi/v1/fundingRate?symbol=LITUSDT&startTime=1750320000003&endTime=1766520000005&limit=1000'

Observed response:

[{"symbol":"LITUSDT","fundingTime":1766520000005,"fundingRate":"0.00005000","markPrice":"3.65645000","rateType":"Regular"}]

Only the newer anchor is returned; the older archived anchor is absent, including in the narrow query above.

Questions

1. Do the 417 post-removal archive rows represent actual settlements, placeholders, or an archive-generation issue?
2. If they are placeholders, is there an official field or documented lifecycle rule that distinguishes them from actual funding events?
3. How can the old Litentry contract's funding history be queried after LITUSDT ticker reuse? Is there an immutable contract identifier or an official historical endpoint?
4. If these archives require correction, are replacement files/checksums or a correction notice available?

Thank you. A documented interpretation or reproducible official retrieval method would help avoid conflating the two contracts or treating missing REST history as proof of no events.