It’s a mind-bending proposition, even by the standards of the self-styled degenerate traders who revel in crypto’s lightning-fast markets.
A new protocol called opt.fun is set to debut on the Hyperliquid blockchain on Thursday. It will offer decentralised options trading with 1,000x leverage and one-minute expiry options.
That’s a lot of torque.
In an interview, opt.fun founder Ryan Galvankar said that to his knowledge the venture will offer the highest leverage of any crypto protocol.
“And what’s meaningful for them, and what they’re seeking by coming onto the blockchain, is incredibly high returns.”
Hyperliquid boom
Opt.fun aims to leverage the popularity of the platform on which it’s built — Hyperliquid.
Hyperliquid launched in 2023 as a standalone, blockchain-based derivatives trading platform. It’s become a magnet for traders comfortable with white-knuckle risk taking.
Hyperliquid allows users to make massive leveraged bets on crypto perpetuals, which are derivatives contracts that don’t expire. Hyperliquid, for instance, lets traders take out 40x leverage when trading Bitcoin derivatives.
It has grown rapidly this year: It clocked $244 billion in trading volume in May, 10% of the $2.3 trillion derivatives haul of Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange.
In February, Hyperliquid launched its own blockchain, which has attracted dozens of protocols and more than $2 billion in user deposits.
Opt.fun takes the Hyperliquid model a step further. Galvankar said the idea came to him while working on his first crypto protocol, Plaza Finance.
“We were talking to users about what they cared about most,” Galvankar said. “And most users wanted short term, high volatility.”
‘Big boy products’
Adding leverage can turbocharge a trader’s gains — and their losses. While it can provide savvy traders a path to quick riches, it can also lead to financial ruin.
Several Hyperliquid traders have lost tens of millions of dollars on the platform, using far less leverage than they’ll have access to on opt.fun.
Galvankar said offering such trading was a matter of levelling the playing field.
“I am annoyed that I today as an individual don’t have access to the same products that I had access to as a trader on behalf of a large hedge fund,” Galvankar said, “simply because I don’t have the capital base to get access to the, quote-unquote, big boy products.”
The name opt.fun is a nod to Pump.fun, a memecoin creation and trading platform on the Solana blockchain. Memecoins are crypto assets that are explicitly valueless, trading on hype rather than purported utility.
Galvankar said he wants to give traders a more equitable alternative to “rigged” memecoin markets.
“The insider set of people launching the token, those people hold the majority of the liquidity, and as soon as there’s some buying pressure, they’ll pull that liquidity and then profit from your entry,” he said.
On opt.fun, traders can make leveraged bets on blue chip crypto assets, which are highly liquid, making their prices exceedingly difficult to manipulate.
“It’s truly a fair arena for people who want extraordinary amounts of volatility, extraordinary amounts of upside,” Galvankar said.
But he was careful to insist that users should only bet what they’re comfortable losing.
Traders who have expressed interest in opt.fun vary in size, but skew “on the smaller trade size,” Galvankar said.
“They’re the types of people who are like, ‘Hey, I’m gonna put 10 bucks in and see if I can make 100 bucks today.’”
Market makers and crypto hedge funds have also expressed interest in opt.fun, according to Galvankar, in part because the platform will launch with negative maker fees.
The upgradeable smart contracts that underpin opt.fun will be public and open source, according to Galvankar. The protocol will feature a “governance committee” at launch, with plans to decentralise over time.
“One thing that always helps with decentralisation is having a governance token,” Galvankar said.
“No plans at the moment, besides an inkling. But it’s the path we can see it going if it gets significant community adoption.”
