Crypto Gave Markets the Perp. Options Are Next.

By Jake Sylvestre, Founder of Hypercall

Crypto’s biggest contribution to financial markets so far is the perpetual future. It started as a way to trade Bitcoin with leverage around the clock. It is now the default way to trade crypto, and on Hyperliquid it has spread to stocks, indexes, oil and companies that haven’t gone public yet. Traditional venues have started copying it.

I think the next thing crypto brings to markets is the option.

Huge in TradFi, tiny on-chain

In traditional markets, options are the main event. S&P 500 index options alone averaged 4.6 million contracts a day in August, more than $3 trillion of notional at today’s index level.

On-chain, options barely register. Every on-chain options venue combined traded $4.4 billion of notional over the last 30 days. S&P 500 options trade that much in about 30 seconds.

The demand is there, and it is growing fast. On-chain options traded $19.5 billion of notional over the past year, and last month’s pace works out to more than $50 billion a year. Nearly all of it is Bitcoin and Ethereum. Meanwhile, traders on Hyperliquid already put about $2.2 billion a day through perps on oil, the S&P 500, Nvidia and other traditional assets. Options on those underlyings are a far bigger market than crypto options, and on-chain that market has barely started.

A case study

We launched Hypercall on June 1 to test that. Since then we’ve listed options on the S&P 500, Nvidia, Micron, Apple, Microsoft, Meta, Alibaba, SanDisk and SpaceX, alongside BTC and ETH.

We’ve traded $592 million in notional since launch, $536 million of it in September. Last week averaged $60 million a day. That makes Hypercall the largest on-chain equity options venue.

It is also a rounding error. $60 million a day is under 1% of what trades on Hyperliquid on a normal day, and about 0.002% of daily S&P 500 options notional. There is a lot of room left.

Why options on-chain will be huge

1. The hedge exists now. Options markets need market makers, and market makers need a cheap, liquid hedge. That was missing for on-chain options on anything other than crypto. Hyperliquid’s perps fill the gap: the same underlying, the same USDC collateral, open every hour. Our makers hedge S&P 500 and single-stock options there, including on weekends. Wherever a liquid 24/7 perp exists, an options market can follow.
2. Defined risk fits a market that never closes. A leveraged perp can be liquidated on a Sunday gap even if the trade is right by Monday. An option buyer knows the maximum loss before entering: the premium. The longer a market stays open, the more that matters.
3. Traders want to trade the news when it happens. Earnings come out after the bell. Macro and geopolitical news breaks on weekends. On August 26, the day Nvidia reported, Nvidia options on Hypercall traded $554,000, against under $10,000 a day the week before. Two days ahead of Micron’s earnings, Micron options traded $7.4 million. SpaceX options don’t trade anywhere else at all.

The next perp

The perp took a product that was awkward in traditional markets and made it the center of crypto trading. Options are the reverse: already the center of traditional trading, and barely present on-chain. Crypto has shown it can build the rails. Options on everything are what runs on them next.