When they are deeply ITM, and their delta is maxed out, with non-existent gamma and vega, they trade more or less identically to their futures counterpart, the perpetual swap. As they get closer to being ATM, they start deviating massively.

One word. Convexity. You don't get positive convexity from perpetual swaps. See the diagram below.



Source: Derivatives Academy

Other reasons are:

• Shorting. Shorting a perpetual swap caps your gain at 100%, while subjecting you to potentially unlimited losses. Puts work in reverse. They cap your losses, while allowing for potentially unlimited upside. If you are shorting, and you are okay with being long volatility (most people are), you should be buying puts - not shorting a perpetual swap.
• Volatility. You can't trade volatility with a perpetual swap. Options allow you to profit even in sideways markets.
• Daytrading and scalping. Options are great for daytrading and scalping, since they tend to be very volatile. Scalpers and daytraders love volatility. If you want volatility while trading perpetual swaps, you are limited to trading shitcoins. Shitcoins are prone to manipulation. With options, you can trade BTC and ETH, and still get plenty of volatility.

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.

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.

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.

One approach, as described by Dave White in the whitepaper, 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 (200 hours). If you assume that one option from your basket will expire at each funding, like Dave White suggests in the whitepaper, 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 200-hour EMA of the underlier, and thus also the strike, is unlikely to change much).

The original whitepaper by Dave White provides a solid overview. We highly recommend reading it.

Everstrike being in beta means the following:

• The frontend web interface may still have non-critical bugs.
• The liquidity on the mainnet may be insufficient for executing anything but the smallest of trades.
• Contract specifications and legal documents may be changed within one week of notice.
• New API endpoints or new API parameters may be introduced within one week of notice. We guarantee to maintain backwards compatibility of existing API endpoints.
• Live support is non-existent, and support response times may, at times, be slow.

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 BTC, 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 January 2023, it is also possible to fund your account using BTC or ETH. However, you will need to convert your BTC or ETH to USD, if you want to use it for derivatives trading. The conversion can be done using one of Everstrike's spot markets (BTC/USD and ETH/USD).

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 a 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. Download it here.

We expect to release an iOS app in Q2 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 20% 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: BTC and ETH deposits are not automatically converted into USD. To convert your BTC and ETH into USD (so that you can use it for options and futures trading), you must manually convert it to USD, using one of Everstrike's spot markets (BTC/USD and ETH/USD).

Everstrike currently supports the following networks/blockchains:

Everstrike currently supports the following stablecoins: