[ANN] Deribit.com: BTC Options and Futures Exchange launched

[deribit]

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:
https://i.imgur.com/TC1kb9k.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/IBe9vFG.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/NhLHWf9.jpg

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[flowerpots]

[deribit]

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

[iwanttobeaminer]

That look interesting , I will have a look. 

[employee-exchange]

UI - https://www.deribit.com/main#/options looks clumpsy. Align it properly 

[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

[flowerpots]

Did someone try this exchange already? I created an account and traded some BTC Options. Also BTC Futures. $10/contract makes it possible for small players to take a bet as well.. but so far, not so much action.

Do people around here know any other BTC Options platforms?

[Deuceisgood]

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

Please please please take a look at linking into Moneypot (MP). I would love to be able to seamlessly transfer my MP funds onto your platform in order to trade opportunistically. Right now I hold a stack of coins on Moneypot, but find myself transferring them out to an exchange (1broker, Bitfinex, etc ...) when I need to put on a trade. Previously I traded on Bitmex, until they stopped servicing US-based customers. :-(  I haven't been able to find a comparable derivatives service since.

*A link/connection to MP will give you immediate access to thousands (?) of potential traders ... perhaps not a bad move once you launch.

[philiveyjr]

Just came across this site yesterday. So how do the options usually work? Right now I see options listed on the site. Who is selling them ? Is it other traders or is the site selling those options ?

[flowerpots]

Just came across this site yesterday. So how do the options usually work? Right now I see options listed on the site. Who is selling them ? Is it other traders or is the site selling those options ?

Normally other traders, although currently I think they are quoted by "the site". Doesn't really matter for you. If you want, you can place an order in the orderbook. Or you can trade with an order that's currently in the orderbook.

[philiveyjr]

Just came across this site yesterday. So how do the options usually work? Right now I see options listed on the site. Who is selling them ? Is it other traders or is the site selling those options ?

Normally other traders, although currently I think they are quoted by "the site". Doesn't really matter for you. If you want, you can place an order in the orderbook. Or you can trade with an order that's currently in the orderbook.

The reason I asked is because it allowed me to buy infinitely many options, which other traders usually don't do. And since it is a new site, I was wondering how is that possible.

[Quickseller]

Your website claims that over 90% of funds are held in cold storage. Do you have any kind of cold storage address that can be verified by the public?

[deribit]

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.

[deribit]

Just came across this site yesterday. So how do the options usually work? Right now I see options listed on the site. Who is selling them ? Is it other traders or is the site selling those options ?

Normally other traders, although currently I think they are quoted by "the site". Doesn't really matter for you. If you want, you can place an order in the orderbook. Or you can trade with an order that's currently in the orderbook.

The reason I asked is because it allowed me to buy infinitely many options, which other traders usually don't do. And since it is a new site, I was wondering how is that possible.

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.

[Quickseller]

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.

Sure it is impossible to prove that an address is in fact "cold" and "cold storage" differs from person to person, however you could sign a message from an address (or collection of addresses) that are holding your cold storage BTC. The concern is not so much that BTC is being held "cold" but is more that you actually are in possession of the BTC that you claim to be in possession of. This would especially help considering that you are very new. 

Another thing you can do is publish proof of liabilities by publishing a hash of some ifebtifier of user accounts and the corresponding balances in their accounts. This would help prove that you are not running on fractional reserves.

[theymos]

I tried this out briefly. The software looks pretty good, but there's basically nobody trading, which is a shame. Due to this, and because they said on the trollbox that they're not going to allow US customers in the future, I didn't actually do any trading. Deposits and withdrawals work.

I'd really like to see more option trading in the Bitcoin universe, since the "insurance" aspect of options is very useful for removing risk from end-users.

[HostFat]

Without fees until the end of the year.

http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/bitcoin-futures-and-options-exchange-deribit-announces-zero-fee-trading-300353787.html

https://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinMarkets/comments/5a1wex/interview_with_john_jansen_ceo_of_deribit_bitcoin/
It seems that US customers are allowed now.

I haven't any connections with them.

[deribit]

I tried this out briefly. The software looks pretty good, but there's basically nobody trading, which is a shame. Due to this, and because they said on the trollbox that they're not going to allow US customers in the future, I didn't actually do any trading. Deposits and withdrawals work.

I'd really like to see more option trading in the Bitcoin universe, since the "insurance" aspect of options is very useful for removing risk from end-users.

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.

[deribit]

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.

[deribit]

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.