S&P 500 options are the hottest bet on this hyperliquid exchange

Hypercall, an exchange built on Hyperliquid, says its largest volume of $640 million has come from the index since June.

Talk about options on the S&P 500, and you're talking about a monster of a market that trades trillions of dollars in real volume every day. Now it seems that crypto traders want to access it through a blockchain.

Hypercall shows the demand. The options platform built on Hyperliquid, the eighth-largest blockchain by total locked-in value (TVL), launched in June, and more than 80 percent of the $640 million in actual volume since then has come from S&P 500 options, the exchange told CoinDesk. Open interest, the value of contracts still known, is about $49 million, of which $47 million is in S&P 500 options.

While these numbers pale in comparison to Deribit's traditional markets and cryptocurrency options business, which began shortly after the platform's launch in 2016 and now routinely sees billions of dollars in daily volume and open interest, they represent a growing trend: a desire to access financial instruments when conventional markets are closed. Hypercall lists daily, weekly and monthly expiration dates, including weekends.

"Volume is concentrated in options that expire the next day," Hypercall founder Jake Sylvester said in an email interview. Traders can comment on the next day's move or hold a position outside of it.

Traders are drawn to blockchains for exposure to traditional markets, including derivatives. Decentralized exchange Hyperliquid (DEX), also known as Hyperliquid, has become a place to trade and manage risk through constant futures trading, especially on weekends when regular markets are closed and geopolitical tensions have repeatedly escalated.

Hypercall brings Hyperliquid permanent futures into the options arena. An option is a contract that pays if the asset moves above or below a specified price on a certain date - depending on the details. A call option makes a profit when the asset closes above that price at expiration. The put option does the opposite. Traders use both to hedge against price volatility and to bet on direction, volatility and timing.

Each Hypercall contract has a multiplier of $1, meaning each indicator point is worth $1 at settlement. A 7000 strike call pays $100 if the index is at 7100. Contracts in USDC, a dollar-pegged stablecoin, are settled against the last 30-minute average price for S&P 500 Hyperliquid gains.

Round-the-clock trading is a lottery. "Hyperliquid has become the best place to trade these markets after hours," Sylvester said.

Market makers on the Hypercall exchange, the firms that announce prices, “protect Hyperliquid's standing futures contracts, including on weekends when the cash stock market is closed,” Sylvester said. Earnings, economic data and company news can move an underlying asset when its stock market is closed, and makers "have to price these events around the clock."

Hypercall does not present itself as an alternative to Deribit, the largest crypto options venue owned by Coinbase Global COIN, which lists more.

"Most of our traders are not leaving Deribit, but markets that Deribit doesn't list," Sylvester said.

Two market makers are active and three more markets are being installed.

"We haven't named them publicly yet, and we expect to do so in the next few weeks," Sylvester said. "The user's collateral is held on-chain," it said, but "order matching is off-chain only." Parts of margining and liquidation are also performed off-chain.

Index options are not the only draw. SpaceX SPCX, Nvidia NVDA, Micron Technology (MU) and SanDisk (SNDK) options accounted for more than half of the trades, followed by Apple AAPL, Microsoft MSFT, Meta META, Alibaba (BABA), Ether and Bitcoin.

Sylvester said, "Extent is in unit names."

Other platforms also add stock options. Bybit began offering 24-hour trading on perpetual stock options on September 17, starting with SpaceX and Nvidia. Binance, the largest cryptocurrency exchange by traded value, offers options on more than 1,000 US stocks and ETFs to qualified users outside the US.

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