We're not a scam.  Please try our test environment and see for yourself. You'll feel that we have build our platform for the long run. https://test.deribit.com.

Once you feel comfy, you can go to https://www.deribit.com to trade with real Bitcoins. Any questions? Ping us in the chat or ask our Community Manager: https://twitter.com/sajmathieu.

I've seen someone posting some pieces of Dash/Darkcoin art some time ago here in the thread. We're opening an office and are considering such a piece of Dash art... does anyone know who made these things and what the prices are?

Good news facts:

- more market makers are going to join our exchange soon and some new ones already joined
- average daily volume on our futures in February: BTC300


Update:
- due to a possible high volatile period that can be coming (ETF?) we changed the initial margin to 4% and the maintenance margin to 2.5% (25x leverage)

We created a short video about the basics of Futures trading, you can check it out here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otOFaNIJ_8w.

Small update: we increased the leverage of our futures to 30x. Also we added a quarterly.

This is not yet shown on the website, but already implemented in our system.

Volume and user signups are steadily growing. We did not make official statement about US customers. But for now, we are not blocking US customers. We are aiming to let anyone trade on our exchange.

Currently on www.deribit.com you can trade (vanilla european style) options up till 3 months out (quarterly). In the market you can either buy or sell, as an example..the current market for a 30 september 700 call is 42dollar bid - 46 dollar ask. Though you wont be able to do huge quantities on those prices, as the market is still not very liquid. (marketmaker is quoting for 2 options on all strikes, after that quote becomes slightly worse., though bigger trades can be negotiated of course in the chat, or by simply placing your bid/ask in the orderbook.

Options are traded on margin. The marketmaker currently quoting will keep quoting even if you buy out the orderbook, but then so at a slighty worse price. So yes you can buy infinitely many options (untill the market maker account has higher initial margin than equity) but at increasingly worse prices. (unlless the marketmaker actively updates prices.)

So if you want to make really a bigger trade (buying/selling 100 options), mighe be better to publish it in the trollbox to see if a deal can be made, because continuing to buy out the orderbook will soon lead to very worsening prices. This because all options are quoted by a tradebot, which is not supervised (looked at by the marketmaker) 24h/day, but adjusted several times per day by the marketmaker.

Actually currently we have few active accounts with deposits as we just started. At the moment all coins are in "hot storage", but the amount is lower than the capital reserves of the company. So at this moment the hot wallet is 100% insured, as if storage would get hacked, we will pay out of own pocket the losses, which at this moment is only 30BTC, and in cold storage (own capital) we have around 200btc (company capital). It is company policy to have 90% in cold storage as soon as we have more deposits, such that it makes sense to place it in cold storage. We could also put 100% in cold storage, but its important for people to be able to immediately (not all at once) withdraw, because traders might need to send their capital to another exchange urgently, or for which ever other reason. (if hot wallet goes empty, trader would have to wait untill we replenish the hot wallet, which we check once a day).

As for "verify" cold storage address... the address being cold or not is impossible to verify. We understand that the big issue, specially for us being a new exchange, is the trust people have in the platform, and we surely need to do something about that to gain trust.

so...at this moment its actually 100% hot storage, but 100% insured with cold storage...which is even better. If hot wallet gets hacked...we will refund 100% all accounts. And it will stay this way. Our hot wallet will never grow bigger than our cold wallet company capital, such that we always can guarantee client funds even in the case of a hack.

as for liquidity, if you want to do a big trade in options, you can also publish it here. the current market is liquid for relatively small quantities, as only we ourselves are now functioning as market makers, with very very tight small spreads, just to get the trading in options going hoping other traders and market makers will join. its compareble to spreads in stock options on big stock exchanges. So for the normal user depositing a couple of BTC and doing small trades, the market is liquid. For a whale wanting to buy/sell hundreds options..well...price discussions can be done also outside the platform in a thread/trollbox, but indeed should not be executed at market.

As for futures...currently we just connect various exchanges via a tradebot on the exchange giving you similar liquidity as other exchanges, though currently the best liquidity for futures trading is without a doubt okcoin (though their index is less reliable for dollar trading, as its mixed dollar/yuan index). We will be trying to add other exchanges, to make the market as tight as possible also in futures. (maybe even just 0.01 spread, as arbitrage between exchanges is virtually always possible...so then instead of arbitrage....we just offer a market with a 0.01 spread...)

I think at the very least it would mean we would need some additional functionality to our API. Currently we dont support withdrawals/deposits(getdepositaddress) via API, but surely can be done quite easy. Its quite common for an account owner to hand api keys to a programmer/tradebot/trader, and not always should be possible to allow for withdrawal with API keys...so a apart from adding it to the API, also the system should allow for creation of API keys with and without possiblity to withdraw. Moneypot also seems also just a service for casinos, so I dont know if we will go that direction...(in some sense... options exchange is a casino, and actually more way exciting than a casino...)

https://docs.deribit.com/ (link will be changed in near future to www.deribit.com/docs )

read 1.4 and 1.5.
we calculate ourselves, there are various "indexes" online, some are not transparent, and with some we simply disagree, we decided to go with our own, though maybe not perfect, we do our best. We take 5 exchanges, take the average of bid-ask from each, dump the highest and the lowest (flash crashes etc, mtgox stories), and take the remaining 3 values (or less if a signal is broken) and take the average of that...thats our index. Further the last half hour before expiration, every 6 seconds we take the index value...for half an hour...and the average of that will be settlement price. (Expiration price.) At the moment we dont even have "in between" settlements, all intermediate gains/losses count to your available balance, either for withdrawal or trading.

We choose for only half hour settlement period...its easier for trading...once we enter this timeframe, pretty soon it becomes clear where we are gonna end up. During this half hour an estimated settlement price is shown in the trading table, which is calculated with all past values, and all future values being assumed being same as last value. (this is the best estimate one can give during this last half before expiration).

Further we have a page dedicated to the index,https://www.deribit.com/main#/prinx_chart, where you can see a graph of the index, as well as a table with the 5 exchanges, colored either red (not part of index at the moment) and colored green. (part of index at that moment.)

Thanks everybody for the advices/feedback/pm. We made a choice already with who to work and they are already on the job. So from our part, this thread can be closed.
apoorvlathey should be making  the signatures now and avirunes should become our campaign manager.

Our exchange with "plain vanilla" options (put and call options, european style, cash settled) and futures.

Please visit https://www.deribit.com/main#/options to see the orderbook of all strikes and expiration dates. In the future we will be adding expirations further away. I know of no other exchange with a decent platform currently offering plain vanilla options on bitcoin.

By the way, there is currently 1 market maker on the platform, we hope to find more traders who would like to be marketmaker on the platform.

https://www.deribit.com for trading plain vanilla options and futures. Our exchange is live only since last friday.

We will do a signature campaign in the near future and are looking for somebody to make the signatures. If you know how to make those signatures and want to make them for us, please drop me a message with your offer. As I understood I need various signatures for the different levels of memberships. The signature campaign will be for www.deribit.com, a bitcoin futures and (vanilla) options exchange.

finally......There is a liquid (plain vanilla) options exchange operative now. Check out https://www.deribit.com/main#/options.
Our exchange went open for trading yesterday, and we are ourselves making a market..somewhat liquid...trying to make a start somewhere. We do our best to put tight quotes, but we need more traders for some price-discovery.

Options traded are european style cash settled in bitcoin and you can trade on margin. (sell up to 10 calls if 1 bitcoin deposited).
Futures can also be traded on the platform. We have not yet implemented portfolio margin. But its on our roadmap.

Cheers,
John (CEO Deribit)

Yes, we have to fix some alignment issues in the tables..not only on options page...thanks for the feedback...(though I not quite agree with you that the page looks "clumsy", it will be better...)

thx

Thanks Flowerpots, for some reason I didnt manage to get those screenshots in our post!

Deribit, a Bitcoin Futures and Options Exchange is from today onwards open for trading at https://www.deribit.com. On our platform you can trade plain vanilla european style options with margin, as well as futures, on the price of bitcoin.

What do we offer?
- Lowest trading fees on the market: 0.01% trading fees for "takers" and 0.00% trading fees for "makers" for both futures and options.
- Plain vanilla european style cash settlement options on BTC price index.
- Advanced options trading interface. (you can see implied volatilities, and the greeks of your own option positions.)
- Futures that settle on BTC price index.
- BTC only platform, no USD required, no bank account required.
- Up to 20x leverage trading bitcoin futures
- Trade vanilla options in a margin account, with up to 10x leverage. (you can sell 10 out of the money calls if you deposit 1 bitcoin)
- Matching engine with less than 1ms latency
- REST, Websockets and FIX API, high performance low latency API with (usually) less than 1ms response time.
- Platform ready for professional market making: sending hundreds of orders per second to the exchange is possible, which is needed to quote all option series. (though we cannot offer this service to all users, the system can offer this to any serious party that needs this bandwidth for market making in options)
- Placing volatility orders (option trading) is built in the core of the platform and available to everybody.
- Placing fixed USD orders for option trading.
- Real-time riskmanagement with smart auto liquidation striving to get user position Delta Neutral.
- Robust and transparant BTC index, based on USD exchanges (a mix of the 5 bigger USD-BTC exchange)
- Majority of BTC in cold storage, but a small percentage remains on our servers to be able to provide immediate withdrawals in most cases.
- Starting with a 100BTC insurance fund and any bankrupties are visible for all users in real time on our Insurance Page.
- Bankrupties are very unlikely due to real time risk management where all user accounts get checked at least once per second.
- Real-time streaming data. All data you see everywhere on the platform is real-time streamed to you via Websockets.

What is not yet implemented but on our roadmap?
- Portfolio margining for professional traders
- Normal margin calculations that takes into account option combinations. (spreads, condors, etc)
- Implied volatility scanner for finding cheap or expensive options based on user settings
- Bulk orders for professional traders. (though even currently processing orders one by one
- Order book for combination orders (options).
- Sub accounts: use subaccounts for individual strategies

Some screenshots:

Somewhere in juli we expect to go live with a bitcoin options (and futures) exchange.
It will be european style options with cash settlement in bitcoin. Thus the platform only accepts bitcoin. It's possible to trade on margin. (with 1BTC capital you will be able to sell up to 10 BTC options)

It will be possible to place orders in BTC (the orderbook keeps orders in btc), but also volatility orders are possible from the very beginning, as well as "constant usd" price orders, where are platform continuously updates the order to track the Implied Volatility or the USD price given, based on the USD index calculated by the platform (average of 5 biggest USD exchanges). So basic market making is possible on the platform without any additional software by simply placing some volatility orders.

We have REST,Websockets and fix api with a matching engine with less than 1ms latency for placing orders.

Anybody who is interested in market making is welcome to contact us.