The cryptocurrencies derivatives marketplace has been constantly evolving as new BTC options have seen increasing popularity among the institutional clients. While the Netherlands-based crypto derivatives exchange, Deribit is leading the show this time.

They recently made an announcement that the firm would be unveiling Bitcoin daily options commencing from 3rd February with a BTC contract set to expire every day of the year.

This segment of crypto-options markets is considerably dominated by the unregulated firms who play the role strong counterparts of CME and Bakkt.

The crypto derivative exchange Deribit has been the front-runner in leading volumes to beat both CME and Bakkt in terms of BTC options trading, as per the reports of Arcane Research, the institutional-focused analytics platform.

As we noted a few weeks ago, the CME launched bitcoin options contracts based on the underlying CME cash- settled futures contracts. While this was not the first bitcoin option contract, as there are already option contracts actively traded at Derebit and LedgerX as well as the ICE/Bakkt options contracts that settle into the underlying physically-delivered monthly futures contract launched on Dec 9th, this launch had been widely anticipated given the dominance of CME in trading bitcoin futures in regulated exchanges.

Since the CME’s bitcoin options contracts were launched on Jan 13th, the open interest has risen to above $10mn according to data from skew.com, well above the peak thus far of the previously listed ICE/Bakkt options just over $1mn. This still remains well below the around $540mn of open interest on Derebit/LedgerX, which form the bulk of the total open interest in Bitcoin options, but the average daily volumes of the CME options since launch at around $1.1mn compares well with the average daily volumes on LedgerX over the same period of $0.4mn. Courtesy: JPM & skew