On-chain options close in on crypto’s $21B-a-day perp market to deepen liquidity everywhere

A Bitcoin holder who wants less downside exposure today usually sells the asset or shorts a perpetual futures contract, taking on funding costs and liquidation risk. On-chain options offer a third path consisting of paying a fixed premium, keeping the Bitcoin, and handing the crash risk to whoever is willing to price it.

Crypto built deep markets for owning assets and for leveraging directional bets, leaving mostly untouched an equally deep market for managing the risk of holding them.

Options exchange Deribit has 85% market dominance for BTC and ETH options, and registered $2.5 billion in options volume in the past 24 hours, according to Coinbase, which closed its acquisition of the exchange that August. Open interest sits at $27.3 billion.

The picture looks different on-chain: OAK Research estimated in March 2026 that on-chain options trading accounts for roughly 0.2% of on-chain perpetual futures volume.

Spot and perpetual futures already give crypto investors the tools to own BTC or ETH outright or to take a directional bet with borrowed exposure. Options let an investor do something neither can, choosing which risk to keep and which to hand off.

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