2020 Cryptocurrency Options Annual Report

• Compared with the USDT perpetual contract and DeFi ignited in 2020, the options market seems to have been in a forgotten corner. The professionalism and high threshold of options have led to a relatively small user group in the market. Related businesses involving option tradings are usually conducted through professional derivatives exchanges such as Deribit and CME.
• Although mainstream exchanges are conquering the futures and spot markets, their attempts on the options market did not have much success.
• But this does not mean that the options market is insignificant. As an important risk hedging tool, the role of options is gradually becoming known to investors in the crypto market. Its trading volume has reached 77.2 billion US dollars throughout the year, and the trading volume in the single quarter of 2020Q4 has reached 45 billion US dollars. The year showed exponential growth, and the addition of emerging professional options exchanges such as bit.com has also begun to challenge the existing structure of the options market. It is foreseeable that in 2021, not only the position of options in the derivatives market will become more prominent, but the competitions among exchanges in the options market will also undergo profound changes.
• The reason for the huge increase in options trading volume in 2020 is the entry of institutions and professional investors behind it, while the reason why the trading volume is not as good as spot and futures is the small number of retail investors. The high threshold of options increases the difficulty of user education. The speculative nature of the cryptocurrency market is extremely high. The vast majority of retail investors do not have strict risk management capabilities, let alone the trading habit of using derivatives to hedge risks. This is the reason that hinders the further outbreak of the options market, but it is also a potential driving force.
• In this 2020 series of annual reports, we separated options from the derivatives exchange report for the first time and produced an independent "TokenInsight 2020 Cryptocurrency Options Trading Industry Research Report", covering a macro interpretation of the options market in 2020, analysis of existing options business exchanges, and user characteristics in the options market. In addition, in this report, we have applied more new methods of interpreting data, digging into the options market from multiple angles, and presenting many new discoveries one by one.

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