S&P 500 options dominate trading on Hyperliquid-based Hypercall

Options on the S&P 500 index have become the main attraction on Hypercall, an options exchange built on Hyperliquid. The platform told CoinDesk that more than 80% of the roughly $640 million in notional volume it has handled since 1 June came from S&P 500 contracts.

The numbers

• Open interest — the value of contracts still outstanding — is about $49 million, with $47 million of that in S&P 500 options.
• Hypercall lists daily, weekly and monthly expiries, including over the weekend, and most volume sits in contracts that expire the next day.
• Each contract has a $1 multiplier: a call struck at 7,000 would pay $100 if the index settled at 7,100.
• Settlement is in USDC, against the average price of Hyperliquid's S&P 500 perpetual futures over the final 30 minutes.

Those figures are tiny next to traditional index options, which trade trillions of dollars in notional value daily, or crypto options leader Deribit. But they point to steady demand for trading traditional markets when stock exchanges are closed.

How it works under the hood

Founder Jake Sylvestre said market makers hedge their positions using Hyperliquid's perpetual futures, including at weekends. Two market makers are live and three more are being onboarded; their names have not been published yet.

The design is a hybrid. User collateral is held on-chain, but order matching happens off-chain, as do parts of margining and liquidation — a trade-off worth understanding before using any such venue.

Single stocks draw the most trades

By number of trades, options on SpaceX, Nvidia, Micron and SanDisk make up more than half of activity, followed by Apple, Microsoft, Meta, Alibaba, ether and bitcoin. Sylvestre said most users aren't leaving Deribit but trading markets it doesn't offer.

Competition is growing: Bybit added round-the-clock options on stock perpetuals on 17 September, and Binance offers options on more than 1,000 U.S. stocks and ETFs to eligible users outside the U.S.

For the basics of on-chain markets, see What is DeFi?