I think options markets will ultimately be much bigger than perpetuals. Perps are easier to understand. Options are far more interesting. I get the appeal of perps. Price goes up, you make money. Add leverage, and the gains (or losses) are multiplied. Simple, intuitive, and perfect for the casino-like experience crypto has built around trading. But calling perps a replacement for options is short-sighted. You're building for the trader who wants leverage today, and missing the much bigger prize: a market that serves both the degen and the institution. Options do both. A retail trader can use them to speculate with leverage. A sophisticated trader can use them to hedge, earn yield, lock in an entry or exit, or manage risk across a whole portfolio. Take a simple covered call. You hold an asset and sell someone the right to buy it from you at a price you chose. You collect a premium, and in return you give up some upside if it rallies past that price. It's not risk-free. But it's a clean way to put an asset you already own to work. Now try doing that with a perpetual. Yes, funding rates exist. And yes, you can build strategies around them. But funding moves with positioning, and it can turn on you overnight. That's a very different thing from selling an option against a bag you hold. Perps give you leveraged exposure. Options let you shape the payoff you want. People say options are too complicated for retail. I don't buy it. The mechanics under the hood can be complex. The experience doesn't have to be. A user shouldn't need to know every Greek or pricing model to understand this: put your capital to work and earn a return, or pay a premium for leveraged exposure. On one side, someone earns yield on their capital. On the other, someone pays for the right to trade with it. The UI can make that simple. *Hint hint: I'm working on bringing something to market along these lines.* There's also a structural problem with perps that people forget. They're built to track spot, but they don't always behave that way. Look at $CASHCAT when it first listed on Hyperliquid. The perp plunged while spot reportedly stayed untouched. Longs got wiped out even though the underlying price barely moved. That's a hard reminder that leverage comes with market-structure risk, not just directional risk. To be clear, perps have their place. Institutions use them, too. And options aren't better for every trade. But as onchain markets expand into stocks and other traditional assets, I think the opportunity for onchain options is exponentially larger than yet another leveraged casino. Perps give you leverage. Options give you leverage, yield, hedging, defined risk, and ways to express a view that perps alone can't. One is a powerful trading tool. The other is the foundation of a much broader financial market.
✦ Takes identified
Are options structurally better suited than perpetuals to serve both retail and institutional traders?
evaluativemarket structure fitcontested
Checking for a wallet…
Where people landed
3 yes · 1 no (casts, from 4 people). These are the classifier’s reading of each cast — not stakes, votes, or a poll.
- yes
I think options markets will ultimately be much bigger than perpetuals. Perps are easier to understand. Options are far more interesting. I get the appeal of perps. Price goes up, you make money. Add leverage, and the gains (or losses) are multiplied. Simple, intuitive, and perfect for the casino-like experience crypto has built around trading. But calling perps a replacement for options is short-sighted. You're building for the trader who wants leverage today, and missing the much bigger prize: a market that serves both the degen and the institution. Options do both. A retail trader can use them to speculate with leverage. A sophisticated trader can use them to hedge, earn yield, lock in an entry or exit, or manage risk across a whole portfolio. Take a simple covered call. You hold an asset and sell someone the right to buy it from you at a price you chose. You collect a premium, and in return you give up some upside if it rallies past that price. It's not risk-free. But it's a clean way to put an asset you already own to work. Now try doing that with a perpetual. Yes, funding rates exist. And yes, you can build strategies around them. But funding moves with positioning, and it can turn on you overnight. That's a very different thing from selling an option against a bag you hold. Perps give you leveraged exposure. Options let you shape the payoff you want. People say options are too complicated for retail. I don't buy it. The mechanics under the hood can be complex. The experience doesn't have to be. A user shouldn't need to know every Greek or pricing model to understand this: put your capital to work and earn a return, or pay a premium for leveraged exposure. On one side, someone earns yield on their capital. On the other, someone pays for the right to trade with it. The UI can make that simple. *Hint hint: I'm working on bringing something to market along these lines.* There's also a structural problem with perps that people forget. They're built to track spot, but they don't always behave that way. Look at $CASHCAT when it first listed on Hyperliquid. The perp plunged while spot reportedly stayed untouched. Longs got wiped out even though the underlying price barely moved. That's a hard reminder that leverage comes with market-structure risk, not just directional risk. To be clear, perps have their place. Institutions use them, too. And options aren't better for every trade. But as onchain markets expand into stocks and other traditional assets, I think the opportunity for onchain options is exponentially larger than yet another leveraged casino. Perps give you leverage. Options give you leverage, yield, hedging, defined risk, and ways to express a view that perps alone can't. One is a powerful trading tool. The other is the foundation of a much broader financial market.
The thing that killed onchain options last cycle wasn't complexity, it was liquidity. A perp is one book per asset. Options split that same liquidity across every strike and expiry. And the covered call vaults that did find size mostly ended up selling cheap upside to market makers every week. Curious how you're solving the seller side
the CASHCAT mention is real, perps are just glorified gambling chips while options actually let people think
Yes and in this case it feels like a “if you build it they will come”