Abstract

not-yet-known not-yet-known not-yet-known unknown This paper investigates the current landscape of option trading platforms for cryptocurrencies, encompassing both centralized and decentralized exchanges. Option contracts in cryptocurrency markets offer functionalities akin to traditional markets, providing investors with tools to mitigate risks, particularly those arising from price volatility, while also allowing them to capitalize on future volatility trends. The paper discusses these applications of option contracts in the context of decentralized finance (DeFi), emphasizing their utility in managing market uncertainties. Despite a recent surge in the trading volume of option contracts on cryptocurrencies, decentralized platforms account for less than 1% of this total volume. Hence, this paper takes a closer look by examining the design choices of these platforms to understand the challenges hindering their growth and adoption. It identifies technical, financial, and adoption-related challenges that decentralized exchanges face and provides commentary on existing platform responses. Subsequently, it introduces a zero-loss liquidity provision strategy on altcoins that utilizes options with automated market makers. These opportunities result in a positive return with no significant risk. It then investigates opportunities in the past using historical on-chain data to emphasize the number of risk-free opportunities that DeFi is missing due to the lack of a functional options exchange on arbitrary ERC20 token pairs on Ethereum. The experiments show 1015 profitable instances in the past three years on 14 token pairs.