Why Crypto Options Have Never Taken Off
Options are among the most powerful financial instruments in TradFi and one of the most popular products for retail speculation. Yet onchain traders, along with much of the world outside the U.S., remain underserved while U.S. options volumes continue to reach record highs.
U.S. listed options trade more than $3 trillion in notional volume every day. Across the onchain options venues tracked by DeFiLlama, just ~$4.3 billion in notional volume was traded over the past 30 days.
Onchain traders are beginning to recognize the same advantages that have made options so popular with U.S. retail. Options offer leverage without liquidation risk, defined downside with convex upside, the ability to speculate on volatility itself, and higher leverage across longer time horizons.
For years, crypto-native teams have failed to deliver an options product capable of capturing speculative retail volume at scale. It’s natural for products in crypto to rush toward becoming everything apps, layering spot, perps, yield, lending, and options into the same platform. But trying to build everything comes at the expense of perfecting anything.
An analogy I like to make is a restaurant with hundreds of items on the menu versus one with three dishes people line up around the block for. The former tries to serve everyone and ends up exceptional at nothing, while the latter masters a narrow offering, earns its customers, and expands from a position of strength.
Great products are built the same way. You start with one thing. You obsess over every part of the experience until it becomes exceptional. You earn your customers. And only then do you earn the right to build on top of it and scale. For options to go mainstream and reach escape velocity among onchain traders, that core offering needs to get three things right: pricing and liquidity, rapid asset listing and curation, and an intuitive user experience.
Pricing & Liquidity
Onchain options markets have historically been built around the same model: build an orderbook, attract market makers, and bootstrap enough liquidity to support buyers and sellers. At a high level, this makes sense.
The problem is that options liquidity is uniquely difficult to scale. An asset on a spot or perpdex is essentially one market. In options, liquidity for every asset is fragmented across dozens of strikes and expiries, each of which needs to be continuously priced and supported. One underlying asset can quickly turn into hundreds or thousands of individual instruments.
Every new asset compounds the problem. Market makers have to price those instruments, manage the Greeks and volatility exposure across the entire portfolio, dynamically hedge their risk as markets move, and allocate capital to support it all. Adding broader asset coverage therefore doesn't just mean supporting another market. It can mean supporting hundreds more.
The problem becomes even more pronounced where retail demand is strongest: short-dated options. In TradFi, 0DTE has become the dominant way for traders to express short-term views. In July 2026, 0DTE contracts accounted for 66.2% of all SPX options volume. Yet onchain, short-dated liquidity remains scarce on majors and deteriorates further as you move down the risk curve.
Part of the problem is also the flow itself. Market makers on open venues have to assume that any trade may be coming from an informed or sophisticated counterparty. They price that adverse-selection risk into their quotes, particularly in short-dated options where the cost of being wrong compounds quickly. The result is defensive pricing precisely where speculative retail demand is most concentrated. Retail traders disproportionately want short-term, directional exposure, while existing onchain market structure makes that some of the hardest liquidity to provide competitively.
This creates a fundamental tradeoff for orderbook-based options venues, where supporting short-dated markets and broader asset coverage ultimately leads to more fragmented liquidity. However, without broad asset coverage, the venue struggles to capture the speculative demand that drives crypto traders to new platforms in the first place.
Asset Curation Traders rarely switch platforms just to trade the same markets they already have. What pulls them somewhere new is access to something they can’t get anywhere else. Retail speculation is driven by moments. A headline breaks, a new token launches, or an asset suddenly starts moving, and speculative demand can appear almost instantly. Traders want immediate exposure. The venue that delivers that exposure when it matters earns the customer.
Hyperliquid nailed this early. It gave traders markets they couldn’t get anywhere else. The asset listing itself became the acquisition channel. Traders came for a specific trade, then stayed to trade established markets like BTC, ETH, and SOL. HIP-3 markets display the same dynamic today. When geopolitical headlines hit while traditional oil futures are closed, onchain oil markets can become one of the few places where traders can immediately express a view. When it comes to speculative markets, timing is part of the product. Long-tail and exotic assets are critical for acquisition. They create moments that pull new traders onto a platform and signal that the venue understands what traders actually want while majors retain those users and generate recurring volume.
The problem is that existing options infrastructure makes this strategy extremely difficult to execute. You cannot rapidly bootstrap a liquid options market for every trending asset using fragmented orderbooks. By the time sufficient liquidity exists, the moment may already be over. The winning options venue must be capable of listing markets at the speed of speculation.
The UX Problem
Options have a UX problem at both ends of the market. For sophisticated traders, the interface isn't the problem. They can navigate option chains, understand Greeks, and construct trades. But when it comes to moving meaningful size or accessing deeper liquidity, the experience often moves entirely outside the product. Their trading interface becomes a Telegram chat with an OTC desk. Access to those desks is often restricted to accredited or institutional investors, putting the best liquidity and execution out of reach for most traders. Newer traders face the opposite problem. They’re faced with all of the complexity of the instrument upfront: option chains, strike grids, bid/ask spreads, implied volatility, Greeks, expirations, and contract specifications, all before they can express a simple view on the market.
One side has access to the execution, but through an antiquated workflow. The other has access to the product, but through an unnecessarily complex interface. Most traders never get access to both. Traders shouldn't have to choose between institutional-grade execution with a manual workflow and a self-serve product that requires them to navigate every layer of complexity themselves. The opportunity is to bring the two together: institutional-grade liquidity and execution paired with an interface simple enough for anyone to use.
How Dream Fixes This
Dream is built on the core belief that retail traders should have access to the same liquidity and execution available to institutions, without needing institutional access or an institutional workflow. Instead of bootstrapping orderbooks, Dream connects traders directly to institutional options liquidity through an RFQ-based brokerage. Market makers compete to price each trade, allowing Dream to offer deep liquidity across a much broader range of assets, strikes, and expiries without requiring liquidity to sit idle across thousands of individual markets. That architecture also changes what can be listed. New markets no longer require liquidity to be bootstrapped from scratch before they become useful. Dream can add assets as demand emerges, giving traders access while the opportunity is still relevant. Dream abstracts away the complexity without taking away the capability. The result is institutional-grade liquidity and markets at the speed of speculation, all through an interface anyone can use.
