Introducing stVol, the first retail-centric options trading platform
Simple, fast, ultra-high leverage, settled on-chain
1/ Options have been too difficult in crypto.
Options are the largest financial derivatives of all kinds. Options are downside-protected but yet provide upside with high leverage.
With the structural advantage, options have strong demand from institutional investors in TradFi. These institutional investors are experienced and technical-savvy enough to implement various options trading strategies with an understanding of nonlinear outcomes and the Greeks behind them. That’s where the initial liquidity came from before participation took off from the retail.
Most of the options trading platforms have been created around these institutional investors, and the options platforms in crypto don’t seem to take a different approach. However, there is one big difference between TradFi and Crypto.
The majority of core crypto users in 2024 are still retail degens, and the retail degens have had limited experience in financial derivatives, mostly on linear products like perp futures only. The institution-centric user experience of the incumbent crypto options trading platforms is way too sophisticated for the retail degens.
Thus it has been very difficult for the crypto options market to bootstrap the initial liquidity, with products that do NOT curate towards the retail users.
While 2024 has been lucky enough to onboard institutional inflow into the crypto market with BTC and ETH spot ETFs being approved, it requires some time to ripe for institutional hedging demand with options.
2/ Retail-centric options trading is needed.
Our thesis started from here.
Options have been too difficult in crypto. We need to provide an easy-to-use options trading venue towards the retail degens. It just has not been delivered that way. Current options trading platforms are more for experienced, pro traders.
Options have to be easy. Options have to be simple. Options have to be fun to trade.
After a few months of discussion and product building, we finally landed on the first-ever gamified options trading platform, stVol.
3/ Solution: Zero-day Binary Option, on-chain settlement
stVol has two key features:
Zero-day to expiry (0DTE)
Binary outcome (0 or 100)
Both features are to simplify the user experience while making trading more fun with high leverage and instant results.
Zero-day to-expiry (0DTE) is the most popular form of options market in TradFi. Retail investors are the core users of the 0DTE options, who buy and flip the position within 30 minutes of average holding period.
While the initial liquidity in the stock options market came from the institutions, the recent surge in the options trading volume came from the retail investors, now taking up more than 50% of total options trading volume.
stVol is taking a step further from this, by engineering the outcome to be binary, either 100 or 0. With this simplified outcome, retail degens are free from the hassle of calculating PnL when trading options.
If you are in-the-money, you make 100. If you are out-of-the-money, you make 0. The cost is what you pay to buy the option.
4/ Simple, Fast & Ultra High Leverage
stVol users can trade options with limited downside at $ the user paid, while still having a levered upside at $100.
Users can technically make 100x in a few seconds, if the underlying price hovers around the strike near expiry, which will change the price of option from $1 to $99 even in the flash moments, for a final outcome of $100.
As above, trading at expiry & at-the-money maximizes the gamified experience to the retail degens, with easy-to-use and instant result features.
This is how stVol started and has been building the options trading platform for retail degens.
Stay subscribed for the next update - about the team and the backers behind it, various trading strategies, and how the team is planning to expand further into its longer vision, etc.
stVol: Options redefined for retail. Infinite ∞ leverage. Lightning-fast results.
⚡Pay $ (from 1 to 99) to win 100
⚡Expires every hour
⚡Stablecoin in / Stablecoin out
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