Trade Options Like You Trade Perpetuals

Just have a quick look at the markets page here on Everstrike.

On a normal day of trading, certain everlasting options can be up as much as 20,000%!

That's an insane amount of volatility. Perpetual futures are not even comparable anymore - the volatility of a simple BTC put option blows away even the most volatile shitcoins on Binance or Kucoin. Succesful traders LOVE volatility.

That's not even accounting for the insane funding opportunities that everlasting options offer. Perpetual futures have meager funding rates (at best, you'll find 2.5% on a shitcoin on Binance) - everlasting options that are ATM regularly have funding rates of 20%/hour. This level of funding presents MASSIVE opportunities. For instance, you could sell covered calls and earn a three figure APY on your BTC. And that's just one example - options with funding open up a TON of new opportunities that were simply not possible before.

Finally, options allow you to create unique P/L curves that are simply not possible with perpetual futures. You can profit regardless of market direction, and regardless of whether the market is crabbing or not. And puts provide unlimited upside on your shorts, while limiting your downside to the price of the option and the funding that you pay (perpetual futures work in reverse - capped upside but unlimited downside).

Once you succesfully migrate to everlasting options, you will find it VERY hard to go back to perpetual futures (especially once you figure out how to 1:1 mimic a perpetual future using a deeply ITM everlasting call).

Everlasting options on Everstrike are GREAT for speculating on short-term volatility, speculating on short-term price movements, and for collecting a steady stream of daily income through funding.

They are NOT GREAT for speculating on implied volatility (vega) and for speculating on longer term price movements. Treat the everlasting option like a superior version of the 0DTE - an intra-day option that will roll the positions of holders automatically - without executing any trades, and without incurring any transaction costs.

If you want to speculate on vega or on longer term price movements, you are better off trading European-style options on Deribit (or you could wait until we launch the EVIX on Everstrike, which will provide traders with plenty of vega exposure).

The everlasting option was invented by Dave White of Paradigm Research in a May 2021 research paper that he co-authored together with Sam Bankman-Fried.

Conceptually, an everlasting option can be thought of as a basket of regular European-style options - all with the same strike price. Once every hour, at the end of each funding period, one option from the basket will expire, and be replaced with a "fresh", longer-dated option. That way, the basket always maintains a constant amount of options.

The cost of replacing the expiring option with the new option is the funding payment. The replacement happens automatically (there are no trades taking place). You don't need to do anything (except making sure that you can afford the funding payment).

The funding rate is simply the difference between the Mark Price of the option and the Index Price of the option.

The Mark Price represents the generally accepted market price of the option (the price, at which the option is trading).

The Index Price represents its intrinsic value (if it was to be immediately exercised at the spot price of its underlier).

Note that Everstrike applies an upper limit to the amount funding that can be exchanged every hour. This limit is currently set to 20% of the contract's open interest. In practice, this means that the funding rate can never exceed 20%, and that the maximum amount of funding that you can pay or receive during a day is capped to (20% * 24) = 480% of your position size.

Funding attempts to keep the price of the option close to its intrinsic value. The extrinsic value of the option is disbursed through periodic funding payments, rather than as a lump sum that buyers pay upfront, when buying the option. This enables sellers to price their options cheaper, and provides buyers with some flexibility in terms of getting out of their position early.

If you are a Thetagang member (selling options to WSB degenerates), you will love the hourly theta that you can collect from selling ATM or OTM everlasting options.

Everlasting options with high gamma tend to have high funding rates, since their market value (price at which they trade) often exceeds their intrinsic value. In other words, they have a volatility premium, and this premium is reflected in the funding rate of the option.

The funding on everlasting options that are deeply in-the-money, and have no gamma, is often negligible or none, making them really good for pure-delta plays.

Up to 20% of your position size per hour, which adds up to 480% throughout an entire day.

On Everstrike, everlasting options are subject to a funding period of 1 hour. This makes their greeks profile (delta, gamma, vega, theta) similar to that of intra-day European-style options.

In general, not accounting for moneyness, you can assume comparatively high gamma and theta values, together with comparatively low vega values.

Longer funding periods (such as 7 days) will yield completely different profiles (favoring vega over gamma), and is something we are considering implementing in the future.

We chose to start out with a really short funding period, since shorter expiries is what traders tend to prefer (intraday options, or 0DTE's, as they are also called, have gotten insanely popular recently), and because the everlasting option really shines in this scenario (traders generally don't mind rolling every week or every month, but rolling every day can quickly eat up a lot of time, and can be very expensive in terms of money lost on execution).

While this choice provides our options with a ton of gamma and theta, their vega is often low and not worth trading. For that reason, we will explore the introduction of longer funding intervals for specific contracts in the future. We are also developing an Everlasting Volatility Index (EVIX) that will provide traders with plenty of vega exposure.

Floating strikes are critical, when it comes to everlasting options, as they ensure that the strikes of the options never become irrelevant. An everlasting BTC call issued in 2016 with a strike of 500 would be completely irrelevant today. Without floating strikes, the everlasting options would (at least in practice) never truly be perpetual.

Additionally, with the right basket of floating strike options (pinned around an average), you are more or less guaranteed to always have ITM, ATM and OTM options at your disposal. Having strikes that continously adapt to the underlier, in order to stay relevant, can greatly reduce the total amount of strikes required by options traders, and reduce liquidity fragmentation significantly, resulting in lower spreads and, ultimately, in lower execution costs for the individual trader.

Options with floating strikes is not a new concept. The Asian-in option is a type of exotic option that has existed for decades, and that also uses a floating strike. As with the floating strike everlasting option, the strike of the Asian-in option is determined by an average of the price of the underlier during a pre-set period of time. However, there has been no attempt at making a perpetual Asian-in option until now.

One approach, as described by Dave White in the original research paper, is to divide the everlasting option into a basket of smaller options. Each smaller option should be assigned an expiry and a weight. All of them should have the same strike. This will allow you to use a traditional pricing model, such as the Black and Scholes, to establish the price of each of these smaller options. The price of the original, everlasting option will then be the weighted sum of the smaller options that you just priced.

Having floating strikes makes the above process a bit more involved, since you can no longer assume that all of the smaller options, that you are pricing, will have the same strike. If some of them expire in multiple days from now, you may not know the strike at their expiration time. This is one reason that we chose to make the funding interval on Everstrike very short (1 hour), and the EMA of the underlier that we use for strike calculation very long (100 hours). If you assume that one option from your basket will expire at the end of each funding period, like Dave White suggests in the research paper, and you have a basket of 10 options, you effectively only need to deal with options that expire 10 hours into the future (during which time the 100-hour EMA of the underlier, and thus also the strike, is unlikely to change much).

The catch is that you would potentially pay a ton of funding until you get your desired movement. So even though you would eventually be ITM, you might have paid so much funding that you will not be able to profit. Buying OTM everlasting floating strike options is basically a race against time.

Demo accounts do not require any personal information.

Live accounts require a valid email address. You may, optionally, set a password as well. If you choose not to set a password, your email address will be used to validate your logins.

For a demo account, nothing.

For a real account, you will need ETH, or one of the following stablecoins:

The stablecoins can be on any of the following networks/blockchains:

Minimum deposit: 0.1 USD.

Minimum withdrawal: 1 USD.

Immediately upon signing up, you will receive your own personal deposit address. You can fund your Everstrike account by sending stablecoins (USDC,BUSD,USDT,DAI) to this address. Everstrike supports a variety of stablecoins and networks.

As of February 2023, it is also possible to fund your account using ETH. However, you will need to convert your ETH to USD, if you want to use it for derivatives trading.

Everstrike does not currently support fiat. However, we expect to add support for fiat in Q3 2023.

Despite not supporting fiat, it is still possible to fund an Everstrike account with a credit card or bank transfer. You simply buy crypto from one of our partners - and they will transfer the crypto directly to your Everstrike account.

Yes. Everstrike provides a fully-fledged demo environment (the Everstrike Testnet).

You can use this demo environment to get familiar with Everstrike, before making a deposit, and engaging in live trading.

Access the Everstrike Testnet here.

Yes. Everstrike is also available as an Android app.

We expect to release an iOS app in Q3 2023.

All options on Everstrike are margined in USD.

Buying options (long call and long put) has a minimum initial margin requirement of 100%. In other words, you must put up $5 to buy a $5 call.

Selling options (short call and short put) has much more complex and stringent margin requirements. In general, to sell options, you must put up at least 6% of the value of the underlier - even if the price you are selling the option at is much lower than that. These requirements are in place due to the potentially uncapped losses that shorts can be subjected to, and the volatility of the price of the option when the intrinsic value of the option is close to zero and its gamma is highest.

To see the exact math that determines the margin requirements for selling options on Everstrike, check out the docs.

Everstrike accounts can be secured with Two Factor Authentication (2FA), withdrawal limits, IP pinning and device whitelisting. For the best security, we recommend that you enable TOTP-based Two Factor Authentication, add a withdrawal limit and only whitelist your own trusted devices.

You should also ensure that the access to your email address is properly locked down with a strong password and Two Factor Authentication.

Everstrike does not charge any fees on liquidations. If your position is liquidated, it will be closed out incrementally, until your Maintenance Margin satisfies the Minimum Maintenance Margin requirements for the contract you are trading. In the vast majority of liquidations, only 10% of your position size will need to be closed out. Once this is done, your position exits liquidation.

Note: Incremental liquidation is not available for positions that are below 0.10 BTC in size. Positions that are below 0.10 BTC in size are liquidated in full, at their bankrupcty price.

Everstrike supports automatic calculation of order quantities, stop losses and take profits, through Everstrike Adaptive and Everstrike Auto SL.

For the technically-savvy, Everstrike also offers a fully-fledged REST and websocket API. Through these API's, you can do almost everything that you could otherwise do through the Everstrike website.

Everstrike automatically converts stablecoin deposits (USDC, USDT, BUSD, DAI) into USD at time of deposit. At time of withdrawal, the USD is converted back to stablecoin.

This frees the user from any stablecoin-related risks while he is trading on Everstrike.

Note: Non-stablecoin deposits are not automatically converted into USD. To convert non-stablecoin assets into USD (so that you can use them for options and futures trading), you must manually convert them to USD, using one of Everstrike's spot markets.

Everstrike currently supports the following networks/blockchains:

Everstrike currently supports the following stablecoins: