Manu G 🧉

Over the last 30 days, Derive has remained over 90% of the onchain options market. In that same time frame, we’ve done about 5% of Deribit’s options volumes, up from 0.1% a year ago. It’s difficult to build momentum in this category because of the uniquely strong network effects around options markets. Users and market makers hold positions and collateral on exchange for the duration of an option, often many months. The difficulty and cost of integration are a liquidity provider is an order of magnitude higher than perps. Options markets are also the last vertical to mature in any asset class. Onchain has finally broken the dam - and Derive, alongside all of our builders and partners, has a chance to redefine the options category, first in crypto, and then beyond. The tailwinds are enormous, and still underappreciated by most people I speak with. 1. Bringing options liquidity onchain unlocks more functionality than any other vertical: programmable, composable building blocks for precise, tailored yield generation, hedging, and speculative trades. One click hedges embedded in every brokerage and fintech, yield generation strategies with verifiable backtests and transparent risk, on any asset, new social trading experiences built using the kinds of trades only options can support. 2. AI for UX: the biggest barrier to entry to trading options is understanding. 2026 has seen a step function change in how models reason about options. This has yet to filter through to UX, but is coming. People shouldn’t trade options if they don’t understand them. But - given they want to express an opinion about the market - they should be able to find the best way to translate that into a trade. Options are often the best way to do so. 3. AI for agentic trading: options give you thousands of ways to express a view across strikes, expiries and structures. For many traders this is overwhelming, but for agents, it’s a much more useful set of choices. My wager is that agents will prefer specificity and precision when executing trades: not just whether an asset goes up or down, but how far, by when, and with how much risk. Options are the answer. These tailwinds are strengthening just as our liquidity hits an inflection point. Big integrations take time to come to fruition, but we’re seeing the results month by month, with many more in the pipeline. At the same time, we’ve completed our biggest infrastructure upgrade in 3 years, taking what was already a leading onchain product into what I believe is the best options infrastructure anywhere. We have so much more work to do, and will be constantly taking feedback, iterating on the product, and ensuring that every dollar of liquidity that onboards to Derive is earned. But we really are only at the dawn of the last major trading vertical to move onchain, and in my opinion, it will be the largest.