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Deribit Unveils Ether Options To Expand Crypto-Derivatives Marketplace

February mid-month series for the crypto-asset markets are sensing a mild exhaustiveness in the previous bullish trend due to the recent bearish weekend that dragged even to begin this week. Market benchmark BTC fell 3.5% from last week so far, currently trading at $9,796 levels (at Coinbase), while the overall crypto market cap pulled back a bit.

While Bitcoin derivatives trading has received multitude of interests, so is the spike in the underlying Bitcoin’s price in the recent past. Amid such recent developments, Deribit launches trading facility for options contracts of ether on Monday.

The renowned cryptocurrency exchange, Deribit has taken Twitter handle to make announcement of the news. This brand new derivatives product is available with strike price intervals of $5 and can be traded in the 24 hours preceding the expiry at 08:00 UTC on a regular basis. They will have a lifetime of two trading days at the time of introduction.

In addition, Deribit has already begun offering daily Deribit BTC index options. As a result, there will be a BTC option contract expiring every day of the year and investors would be able to choose from a wide range of expiries ranging from one day to nine months.

Besides the shorter time to expiry, the new daily options will have similar contract specifications to the other options already available on Deribit. The daily options will be tradable the day immediately preceding the expiry day (8 AM UTC) and will therefore have an initial lifetime of two trading days at the time of introduction. In line with our current range of options, they will expire every day at 08 AM UTC and the settlement prices will be published on the Deribit Indexes page. Strike price intervals will be USD 125 and Deribit strives to offer a range of around 5% around the ATM level (plus and minus).

These short dated expiries are specifically interesting for investors and traders with a short term view based on for example macroeconomic data or events. Deribit will work with its market makers to ensure that highly competitive prices are available on screen.

For now, Panama-based Deribit unveiled cash-settled options on ether of longer tenors at the end of March 2019. Since then, the exchange has traded an average daily volume of $1.9 million, according to Skew Markets.

Thereby, cryptocurrency derivatives market has begun to obtain myriad interests after the recent trends in Bitcoin price sentiment. There has been a long waiting of cryptocurrency aspirants for institutional investors. Although the launch of bitcoin futures contracts on regulated exchanges in late 2017 made a bit of a buzz but didn’t gain a lot of traction, of late, Bakkt and CME appear to be striking a chord in new cryptocurrency arena with their new crypto-derivatives products, such as, physically-settled bitcoin futures and options contracts.

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