The Renaissance of Onchain Options
Mapping the expansion of options as a trading instrument and the volatility that prices them
Data snapshot: July 2026. Figures are preserved from the published report and are not live market data.
“Options and prediction markets should not be treated so separately, as they are effectively different interfaces for the same underlying demand: priced conditional outcomes.”
▮ The numbers that matter
Executive Summary
A new group of order-book, AMM, perpetual-option and binary-market venues is rebuilding onchain options after the DOV cycle. Co-authored with Block Scholes, the report maps those products, compares one-day BTC binary markets and uses BTC and ETH volatility surfaces to examine how options and prediction markets price conditional outcomes.
Key findings
- 01Exchange-traded options volume exceeded futures by more than four times in 2024, while U.S.-listed options reached about 15.2 billion contracts in 2025.
- 02Onchain product design has expanded beyond DOVs into order books, AMMs, perpetual options, short-dated binaries and prediction markets.
- 03Across the 22 to 28 June 2026 BTC binary sample, Kalshi averaged $4.24 million in daily volume, Polymarket $2.76 million and Hyperliquid about $400,000.
Covered in the report
Inside
- 01Executive Summary
- 02Options in Financial Markets
- 03The Crypto Options Ecosystem
- 04Vanilla, Exotic and Short-Dated Options
- 05Prediction Markets as Option-Like Instruments
- 06Comparing Binary Options Providers
- 07The State of BTC and ETH Volatility
- 08Where Onchain Volatility Markets Are Going
Method and Data Boundary
Castle and Block Scholes map onchain options venues and analyse BTC and ETH volatility surfaces. The binary-market comparison covers 22 to 28 June 2026 using Hyperliquid data from 0xArchive and public Polymarket and Kalshi APIs, with volume and spread calculated separately for each venue.
- Published
- July 2026
- Data snapshot
- July 2026
More on this topic: Prediction Markets & Volatility