How to Use Official FTX API Client to Retrieve Historical Funding Rates

We will use the official FTX client API for Python found at this GitHub link to pull the historical funding rates for any perpetual futures contract on FTX! In our example, we will modify the code slightly in order to pull hourly OHLCV timeseries data going all the way back to inception of the perpetual contract. If you are wondering what funding rates are, please take a look atthis article written by Binance that explains funding rates more in depth. Quoting the article: "Funding Fates are periodic payments either to traders that are long or short based on the difference between perpetual contract markets and spot prices. Therefore, depending on open positions, traders will either pay or receive funding."

The official FTX client class has been modified so that an account or login is not required in order to access the public data endpoints. We will create 3 other functions that are described below. There are 2 main functions to pull the funding rates from FTX (#2 & #3). One function will pull all of the current rates and save the file to CSV and the other will pull all funding rates historically for a particular ticker. The official FTX client code is in the class object called "FtxClient"

1) getUnixTimestamp --> This function will convert a datetime object string into its unix/epoch equivalent
2) get_current_funding_rates --> This function will get current funding rates for all open perpetual futures contract and save the results to a CSV
3) get_historical_funding_by_ticker --> This function will pull all historical funding rates available between now and 2015 and save the results to a CSV file