introduction

Market Overview

In 2025, stablecoins and DAT expanded in both scale and application scenarios, beginning to directly connect with traditional finance at the boundary level. The total market capitalization of stablecoins once exceeded $230 billion, with an annual on-chain settlement scale of approximately $1.5 trillion. Supported by legislation such as the GENIUS Act, they gradually solidified as the underlying settlement layer for cross-border payments and on-chain finance. The DAT model, through compliant equity or fund vehicles, provided traditional institutional investors with a standardized path to access crypto asset exposure. At its peak, the market capitalization of its BTC and ETH holdings exceeded $140 billion, representing a year-on-year increase of more than three times. RWA acted as a key intermediary in this process: anchoring real-world asset cash flow on one end and connecting the on-chain settlement and valuation systems of stablecoins and DAT on the other. The BCG-Ripple 2025 report predicted that the tokenized asset market would expand from the current approximately $600 billion, at a compound annual growth rate of approximately 53%, to nearly $18.9 trillion by 2033, providing a scale assumption basis for this evolution.

2025 also marked a turning point for decentralized derivatives, transitioning from proof-of-concept to actual market share competition. Mainstream on-chain derivatives protocols made substantial progress in technical architecture, product form, and user experience, beginning to offer a considerable alternative to the trading and listing advantages of centralized exchanges (CEXs). High-performance application chain architectures, exemplified by Hyperliquid, validated that decentralized infrastructure can directly compete with centralized matching platforms in specific scenarios in terms of throughput, latency, and capital efficiency. Intent-centric architecture became the core paradigm for DeFi user experience upgrades in 2025: users only need to provide the target state, and a Solver or AI agent competitively searches for the optimal execution path off-chain before submitting it to on-chain settlement, significantly reducing the operational threshold for complex transactions.

In 2025, the on-chain rollout of RWA became a significant milestone for the crypto industry, marking its move towards the mainstream. Its growth was primarily driven by two factors: first, a marginally relaxed regulatory environment, with the US striving to reshape its position as a crypto financial center, making US Treasury bonds and stocks the core assets for tokenization; and second, strong real demand—a large number of global investors lacked direct and convenient channels for trading US stocks, and tokenization, to some extent, lowered the entry barriers imposed by nationality and region. Token Terminal data shows that the market capitalization of stock tokens increased by 2695% in 2025.

Meanwhile, the brand effect of leading issuance and trading platforms is gradually emerging: Ondo and xStocks, among others, have become representative players in the RWA narrative by focusing on on-chain accessible traditional financial assets; mainstream exchanges such as Bitget and Bybit continue to invest resources in the listing, trading, and liquidity support of related assets. Coupled with the advantages of eliminating cumbersome account opening and 24/7 trading, stock tokens became a sector with significantly increased market attention in 2025. A Bitget report shows that during Q3 2025, its stock contract trading volume increased by 4468% quarter-on-quarter, with cumulative trading volume exceeding $10 billion.

With a gradually clearer macro narrative and regulatory framework, and a convergence of uncertainties, more complex trading structures and game-theoretic spaces are emerging. Based on this macro and institutional background, Part Two will shift to an empirical portrayal of centralized trading infrastructure: by quantitatively tracking the distribution of spot and derivatives trading volumes and market share changes on mainstream CEXs, as well as the fund flows of BTC spot ETFs, this section will depict the fund allocation paths of various participants in 2025, the structural reshuffling of market share among trading platforms, and the reshaping of overall market liquidity and price discovery mechanisms by institutional capital inflows.

Centralized Derivatives Exchange

CEX Derivatives Trading Volume

In 2025, the total trading volume of the cryptocurrency derivatives market was approximately $85.70 trillion, with an average daily trading volume of approximately $264.5 billion. Against the backdrop of a still tight macroeconomic liquidity environment and a phased recovery in risk appetite, the overall trading activity throughout the year exhibited a structure of "low at first, then high, with volatile upward movement." Currently, derivatives have become the primary venue for price formation and risk management for most mainstream assets. The chart shows repeated days of high-volume trading above the average value indicated by the orange dashed line, with a single-day peak of approximately $748 billion on October 10th, significantly higher than the normal level for the year. This reflects that during periods of accelerated market movement, derivatives have become the core battleground for price discovery and leveraged trading. Looking at monthly figures, the average daily trading volume in the first quarter was mostly around $200 billion, gradually increasing from the second quarter onwards, with the average daily level rising above $300 billion in July-August and October.

Behind the total trading volume of $85.70T and the average daily trading volume of $264.5B, the market share distribution exhibits a highly concentrated characteristic. Binance firmly holds the market leadership position with a cumulative trading volume of $25.09T and an average daily trading volume of $77.45B, with a market share of approximately 29.3%. This means that for every $100 of trading volume in the global derivatives market, about $30 occurs on Binance.

The competitive landscape of the second tier exhibits distinct characteristics. OKX, Bybit, and Bitget follow closely behind, with a cumulative trading volume ranging from approximately $8.2 to $10.8 trillion, and a daily average of $250 to $330 billion. Together with Binance, they account for approximately 62.3% of the overall market share. OKX ranks second with a total volume of $10.76T and a daily average of $33.20B, holding approximately 12.5% of the market share. Bybit follows closely behind with a cumulative trading volume of $9.43T and a daily average of $29.11B, holding approximately 11% of the market share. Bitget ranks fourth with a total volume of $8.17T and a daily average of $25.20B, holding approximately 9.5% of the market share.

Gate.io ranked fifth with $5.91T, averaging $18.24B daily, and its market share dropped to approximately 6.9%. While Gate.io, as a long-established exchange, still maintains a certain size, the gap between it and the top three is widening. More noteworthy is the significant gap following Gate. BingX's $2.27T is less than 40% of Gate.io's, while Crypto.com and KuCoin have fallen to the hundreds of billions of dollars level ($922.61B and $888.56B respectively), only 3-4% of Binance's. Long-tail platforms like Crypto.com and KuCoin each hold approximately 1% of the market share, primarily serving regional or niche customer groups; their bargaining power and liquidity stickiness are significantly weaker than the leading platforms. Comparing year-on-year and month-on-month growth rates in trading volume, Bitunix leads in both metrics, exhibiting the steepest growth slope and being one of the fastest-growing platforms in terms of trading volume.

This precipitous distribution reveals the Matthew effect in the platform economy, where leading platforms leverage their liquidity advantages to create a self-reinforcing cycle. For smaller platforms, it's crucial to establish a differentiated positioning within niche markets; otherwise, they will face continuous pressure to lose market share.

CEX Derivatives Open Interest

In 2025, global open interest (OI) in crypto derivatives experienced a volatile trajectory, initially declining, then rising, and finally plummeting. After a period of deep deleveraging in Q1, OI briefly bottomed out at $87 billion due to panic, but then demonstrated remarkable resilience in Q2, rebuilding confidence from hesitant exploration to moderate increases in open interest. This recovery trend intensified in Q3, culminating in a near-frenzied accumulation of leveraged bubbles, with funds rapidly flowing in and driving OI upwards, reaching a historical high of $235.9 billion on October 7th. The highly crowded trading structure significantly increased the probability and severity of market corrections; the lightning-fast deleveraging at the beginning of Q4 wiped out over $70 billion in open interest in just one day, representing one-third of the total. Despite this, OI, which fell back to $145.1 billion, was still 17% higher than at the beginning of the year, and overall fund inflows in the second half of the year were significantly higher than in the first half.

Based on the average daily open interest (OI) data of major centralized exchanges (CEXs) in 2025, the global derivatives market has solidified into a clearly tiered oligopoly. The top ten centralized exchanges collectively held approximately $108.3 billion in open interest (OI), with Binance accounting for about 28% with an average daily OI of approximately $30 billion. Bybit, Gate, and Bitget held approximately $19 billion, $15.6 billion, and $15.3 billion respectively, giving the top four platforms control about 73% of the total tradable leveraged positions across the network. Adding OKX, the top five platforms account for over 80% of OI, demonstrating extremely high concentration among the leading players. Binance, with its approximately $30 billion average daily OI, established a commanding lead, its size nearly equal to the combined size of the second and third-ranked exchanges, playing a decisive role as the cornerstone of market liquidity. Following closely behind is the second tier, comprised of Bybit, Gate, and Bitget. The daily holdings of these three companies remain at a high level of $15 billion to $19 billion, collectively controlling half of the market. Among them, the daily difference between Gate and Bitget is only about $300 million, indicating a highly competitive rivalry between the two in terms of market share.

OKX's relatively low open interest data is due to two main reasons. First, OKX offers a product architecture with high capital utilization, where funds rapidly rotate between different trading pairs and products, distributed across non-trading modules such as spot trading, wealth management, and staking. Therefore, the open interest metric cannot fully reflect the true scale of funds held in the market. Second, there may be a discrepancy between trading volume and open interest on some platforms. Investors should pay more attention to the trading structure and fund distribution, rather than relying solely on the open interest metric.

CEX Liquidity Depth

Based on bilateral liquidity depth data for major assets (BTC/ETH/SOL) in 2025, the market exhibits a market structure drastically different from OI. Binance unsurprisingly dominates with a commanding lead; its $536 million BTC depth is not only 2.6 times that of the second-ranked platform but also almost equal to the combined total of the other four, solidifying its absolute position as the global liquidity hub for cryptocurrency derivatives. OKX, with $202 million in BTC depth and $147 million in ETH depth, demonstrates its strong ability to handle large transactions, proving that it remains the preferred choice for institutional and whale trading, second only to Binance.

In the BTC market, Bitget ranks third with a bilateral depth of approximately $103 million, about 2.7 times that of Bybit and 7 times that of Gate, contributing nearly 11.5% to the overall BTC market depth. In the ETH market, Bitget's ±1% depth is approximately $97.48 million, approaching 70% of OKX's and far exceeding Bybit and Gate, contributing nearly 20% to the overall ETH market depth. This creates a liquidity distribution where Binance leads by a wide margin, OKX remains firmly in second place, and Bitget consistently occupies a core position in the second tier. Even in the relatively less liquid SOL market, Bitget still provides over $22.42 million in ±1% depth, about 60% of OKX and Bybit's, accounting for approximately 14% of the overall SOL market depth, demonstrating its considerable order absorption capacity even in highly volatile, relatively long-tail mainstream assets.

CEX user asset accumulation

Based on user asset accumulation data in 2025, the crypto market exhibits a highly concentrated unipolar structure in terms of fund custody. Calculated using the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index, the concentration of CEX custodied assets in 2025 was 5352, indicating that the cryptocurrency exchange market is in a highly oligopolistic state, with Binance dominating, holding over 72% of the market share. Binance's average daily custodied assets were approximately $163.9 billion, peaking at approximately $214.3 billion during the year, more than 2.5 times the combined assets of the next seven major platforms. This concentration means that, in terms of actual fund storage and custody, Binance effectively plays a role similar to "systemic infrastructure," and its operations and compliance have a amplifying effect on the robustness of the entire crypto market.

OKX ranks second with approximately $21 billion in daily assets and a peak of $24.8 billion, roughly twice the size of Bybit in third place, demonstrating its advantage in user fund retention and long-term asset accumulation. However, this bipolar structure plus multiple mid-tier platforms means that fund custody risk is highly concentrated on the top two platforms. If any platform experiences a tail-end event in compliance, technology, or operations, its spillover effect will far exceed the market share of the individual platform. Beyond the second tier, the market enters the more competitive $10 billion range. Bybit, Gate, and Bitget, with approximately $11.05 billion, $10.07 billion, and $7.15 billion in daily assets respectively, collectively form the second-tier asset carrier layer. The top five platforms together absorb over 90% of user assets, indicating a high concentration of user funds.

CEX rankings

To move beyond a narrative focused on sheer volume and shift towards comparable quality in the top-tier derivatives trading platforms on the CEX side, CoinGlass has conducted a comprehensive scoring and ranking of major derivatives CEXs. The chart below uses fundamental trading data as the core weight and provides sub-scores and weighted total scores across dimensions such as product, security, transparency, and market quality. This visually presents the structural differences between platforms in terms of liquidity capacity, risk control constraints, and information disclosure.

Clearing data

In 2025, the combined notional amount of forced liquidation for both long and short positions is estimated at approximately $150 billion, corresponding to a daily average of about $400-500 million in normal leveraged liquidation. On most trading days, the scale of long and short liquidations remains in the range of tens of millions to hundreds of millions of dollars, primarily reflecting daily margin adjustments and short-term position clearing under high leverage, with limited medium- to long-term impact on prices and structure. Truly systemic pressure is concentrated in a few extreme event windows, with the deleveraging event of October 10-11 in mid-October being the most typical.

On October 10, 2025, the total liquidation volume in the market reached an extreme peak within the sample period, with a combined liquidation of over $19 billion from both long and short positions, far exceeding the single-day highs of previous liquidation events. Based on the disclosure schedules of some platforms and feedback from market makers, the actual nominal liquidation volume may be close to $30-40 billion, several times that of the second-highest event in the previous cycle. Structurally, the liquidation volume on that day was heavily skewed towards the long side, with long positions accounting for approximately 85-90% of the liquidations, indicating that the BTC and related derivatives market was in an extremely crowded state of long leverage before the event.

From a causal perspective, the trigger for the October 10-11 events stemmed from an exogenous macroeconomic shock. On October 10, US President Trump announced a 100% tariff on Chinese imports starting November 1 and planned export controls on critical software, significantly raising market expectations for a new round of high-intensity trade war. Global risk assets subsequently entered a clear risk-off mode. Prior to this, BTC had already reached an all-time high of approximately $126,000 in 2025, driven by expectations of monetary easing and expanding risk appetite. The leverage ratio of long positions in the derivatives market was high, and the basis between spot and futures prices was high, meaning the entire system was essentially in a fragile state of high valuation and high leverage. The exogenous macroeconomic negative event occurred against this backdrop, becoming the direct trigger for the concentrated liquidation chain.

What truly determines the magnitude of an event's impact is the leverage and product structure, as well as the design of the liquidation mechanism, which were established beforehand. Compared to three or four years ago, the market in 2025 features more perpetual instruments with high open interest, more small- and mid-cap assets, and more large platforms, resulting in a significant increase in overall nominal leverage. Simultaneously, many institutions employ complex strategies involving long-short hedging, cross-asset, and cross-maturity operations. While these strategies appear to be "risk hedging" on the surface, they are actually highly dependent on the orderly operation of the liquidation engine and ADL mechanism under extreme circumstances, failing to effectively manage tail risks. Once the liquidation and risk management mechanisms deviate from their ideal trajectory under pressure, the hedging legs that should offset each other will be mechanically dismantled, forcing portfolios originally constructed as neutral or low net exposures to be exposed as high net directional positions.

After prices fell below key margin thresholds on October 10th, the standard order-by-order liquidation logic was triggered, with a large number of short positions with insufficient margin being dumped into the order book for market liquidation, triggering the first round of concentrated deleveraging. As order book liquidity was rapidly depleted, the insurance funds of some platforms were unable to fully absorb the losses, forcing the long-dormant Automatic Reduced Position (ADL) mechanism to intervene. By design, ADL is used to force short covering in extreme situations, such as when the insurance fund is insufficient, to prevent prices from being driven directly to extreme levels by liquidation pressure, thus preventing the platform from becoming insolvent. However, in this incident, the execution of ADL (Alternative Demands) exhibited significant deviations in price transparency and execution path: some positions were forcibly liquidated at prices significantly deviating from market prices, causing short positions held by leading market makers, including Windtermute, to be passively closed at prices far from reasonable levels, making it almost impossible to hedge losses through normal trading. Simultaneously, ADL triggers primarily focused on less liquid altcoins and long-tail contracts, rather than mainstream assets like BTC/ETH, leaving many institutions employing structured strategies such as shorting BTC/longing Alt without short hedging options in a short period, rapidly exposing them to sharply declining non-core cryptocurrency exposure. The deviations in the execution of liquidation and the ADL mechanism, coupled with infrastructure issues, amplified the pressure. Under extreme market conditions, multiple centralized platforms and on-chain channels experienced congestion in withdrawals and asset transfers, with cross-platform funding channels partially disrupted at critical moments. Typical cross-exchange hedging paths could not be smoothly implemented, making it difficult for market makers, even those willing to assume counterparties, to hedge risks on other platforms or markets in a timely manner. In this scenario, professional liquidity providers are forced to reduce their quotes or even temporarily withdraw due to risk control, further relegating price discovery to the automated logic of the clearing engine and ADL. Meanwhile, under high load conditions, some CEXs experience matching and interface glitches or even brief shutdowns. Furthermore, the crypto market lacks clear circuit breaker and centralized bidding mechanisms like those in traditional stock and futures markets, forcing prices to continue falling on a passively liquidated order book in the short term, further amplifying tail volatility.

At the outcome level, the impact of this event on different assets and platforms was highly uneven, but we believe its long-term impact has been significantly underestimated. The maximum decline for mainstream assets such as BTC and ETH was roughly in the 10-15% range, while a large number of altcoins and long-tail assets experienced extreme drawdowns of 80% or even close to zero, reflecting the most severe price distortions caused by the liquidation chain and ADL execution on the least liquid assets. Compared to the Terra/3AC period in 2022, this event did not trigger a large-scale chain of institutional defaults. While market makers such as Windemute suffered some losses due to the ADL mechanism, their overall capital remained sufficient, and the risk was more concentrated in specific strategies and assets, rather than spreading to the entire system through complex market structures.

On-site derivatives and DAT

On-site derivatives

Fiscal year 2025 was not only a watershed moment in the history of digital asset development, but also a crucial year for CME to establish its position as a global center for cryptocurrency pricing and risk transfer. If 2024 was the inaugural year for the introduction of spot ETFs, then 2025 was the inaugural year for the deepening of the exchange-traded derivatives market. In this year, we witnessed institutional capital shift from purely passive allocation to active management using complex derivatives strategies, and the liquidity barrier between the compliant exchange-traded derivatives market and the unregulated offshore market was completely restructured.

The most disruptive product innovation of 2025 was undoubtedly the launch and widespread adoption of Spot-Quoted Futures (codes QBTC and QETH). Unlike traditional futures, these contracts are designed to provide a closer anchor to spot prices through a special settlement mechanism, significantly reducing basis risk and rollover costs.

With the launch of real-time data for the CME BTC Volatility Index (BVX), the market will likely see tradable volatility futures in 2026. Institutional investors will, for the first time, have a tool to directly hedge unknown risks without needing to simulate them through complex option combinations.

In 2025, we witnessed the normalization and scaling up of basis trading. With the exponential growth of spot ETF assets under management, using CME futures for cash-futures arbitrage has not only become a mainstream strategy for hedge funds, but also a key link connecting traditional financial interest rates with native crypto yields.

Currently, leveraged funds hold a net short position of 14,000 contracts. In-depth analysis reveals that this is a direct result of basis trading. Leveraged funds buy BTC in the spot market or through ETFs, while simultaneously selling an equal number of futures contracts on the CME. This combination is Delta neutral, aiming to profit from the basis when futures prices are higher than spot prices. As inflows into spot ETFs increase, leveraged funds' short positions actually increase in tandem. This proves that the short positions are not directional shorting, but rather used to hedge against the long positions created by spot ETFs. At its peak, leveraged funds held a net short position of 115,985 BTC; in effect, they are the primary providers and intermediaries of liquidity in the spot ETF market.

Data shows that the annualized basis of the previous month's contracts surged to the 20-25% range during the bull market in November 2024, but compressed to near zero during the deleveraging period in Q1. In July 2025, the annualized basis of the SOL and XRP near-month futures contracts once soared to nearly 50%, far exceeding the basis level typically seen in BTC futures, clearly exposing the lack of effective cross-market arbitrage power in the relevant markets. Without highly liquid and regulated spot investment instruments, institutional funds struggle to deploy large-scale cash and arbitrage structures for futures short/spot long positions, naturally failing to sustainably suppress excessively high basis premiums. With the launch of SOL and XRP spot ETFs under a common listing regulatory framework, this structural gap has been partially filled, providing compliant institutional capital with the necessary spot vehicle and liquidity foundation to enter the market and compress futures basis through arbitrage. With the CFTC's approval of spot trading, it is highly likely that spot and futures margin offsetting will be achieved in 2026. This will free up billions of dollars of idle capital, greatly improving the market's leverage efficiency. At that time, the friction costs of basis trading will drop to a historic low, and basis levels may further converge to those of traditional commodities.

In November 2025, the CME cryptocurrency sector saw a record daily trading volume of 424,000 contracts, with a notional value of $13.2 billion, representing a 78% year-over-year increase. This figure surpassed any single month's performance in 2024 and approached the peak levels of the 2021 bull market, but its composition was healthier, driven more by institutional hedging and arbitrage than by pure retail speculation.

While BTC maintains a dominant position in nominal open interest, 2025 was a year of explosive liquidity growth for ETH derivatives. Data shows that the average daily trading volume of ETH futures surged 355% year-on-year in Q3, far exceeding BTC's growth rate. The passage of the GENIUS Act in July 2025 removed the final compliance hurdle for traditional financial institutions entering the market, directly driving the CME cryptocurrency complex to a record $31.3 billion in average daily open interest in Q3. Micro contracts continued to play a cornerstone role in liquidity. The ADV of micro ETH futures (MET) reached an astonishing 208,000 contracts in Q3. According to brokerage data, many mid-sized hedge funds and family offices prefer to use micro contracts for position adjustments to more precisely match the size of their spot portfolios, avoiding the overly granular problems associated with standard contracts (5 BTC / 50 ETH).

For a long time, the CME was a duopoly market dominated by BTC and ETH. However, this pattern was disrupted in 2025. With the launch of SOL and XRP futures and options, the CME officially entered the era of multi-asset trading. SOL, a strong contender for the third largest asset, has seen its futures perform impressively since its launch in March. As of Q3, cumulative trading volume reached 730,000 contracts, with a notional value of $34 billion. More importantly, SOL futures open interest (OI) quickly surpassed $2.1 billion in September, setting a record for the fastest doubling of open interest in new contracts. Meanwhile, XRP futures have traded 476,000 contracts since their launch in May. The XRP options launched on October 13th became the first such product regulated by the CFTC. This signifies that institutional investors no longer equate cryptocurrency with BTC. For assets like SOL and XRP with different risk-return characteristics, institutions are beginning to seek compliant hedging channels, indicating that multi-strategy crypto hedge funds will be more active on the CME in the future.

DAT

At the start of fiscal year 2025, the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) issued Update ASU 2023-08, which officially took effect. This rule change was the cornerstone of the explosive growth in the financial performance of the Digital Asset Treasury (DAT) sector this year. The new standard mandates that companies use fair value measurement for specific crypto assets and directly include changes in fair value in current net profit. A Digital Asset Treasury (DAT) refers to publicly traded companies that systematically migrate most of their reserves—far exceeding daily operational needs—from cash and short-term debt to digital assets such as BTC, ETH, and SOL. They treat crypto assets as a core allocation on their balance sheets, rather than peripheral speculative positions. Unlike spot ETFs, DATs are not passive tracking tools but rather corporate entities with full operational control and capital management capabilities. Company management can use convertible bonds, ATM issuances, and other methods to continuously increase the number of digital assets per share through value-added financing, creating the so-called DAT flywheel effect. When a stock price has a premium relative to its net asset value (NAV), a company issues new shares to purchase more digital assets, which dilutes equity while increasing the amount of digital assets per share, thus supporting or even amplifying the premium.

Throughout 2025, the BTC holdings of listed companies DAT followed an almost monotonously upward trajectory, increasing from approximately 600,000 coins at the beginning of the year to approximately 1.05 million coins in November, accounting for approximately 5% of the theoretical total supply of BTC. Among them, Strategy alone increased its holdings from approximately 447,000 coins to approximately 650,000 coins, remaining an irreplaceable core treasury in absolute terms, but its market share slipped from approximately 70% to just over 60%, with the increase coming more from small and medium-sized DAT companies.

In the second and third quarters, various DAT (Digital Amount and Tag) models collectively entered the market, pushing total BTC holdings past the million-coin mark. In the fourth quarter, although net capital inflows plummeted from their peak and DAT's price premium was significantly squeezed, the curve only showed a slowing slope rather than a reversal in direction, without systemic deleveraging or forced liquidation. This trend suggests that the so-called bubble burst was more of a repricing at the equity level than a collapse of BTC positions on the asset side. DAT has evolved from a speculative trading activity into a structural buying layer within the regulatory framework, forming a BTC supply-side buffer locked in by corporate governance, accounting standards, and information disclosure systems. Simultaneously, the industry structure has evolved from a "single whale dominance" to a "whale + long-tail group," with the risk focus shifting substantially from the coin price itself to the financing structure, corporate governance, and regulatory impact of individual DATs. The key to the DAT sector is no longer predicting short-term BTC price fluctuations, but understanding the financing structure, derivatives exposure, and macro hedging logic behind these companies. With the MSCI index review approaching and a potential shift in global monetary policy looming ahead in 2026, the volatility test for DAT companies is only just beginning.

Options Market

The core narrative of this year's options market is defined by two milestone events that have reshaped the pricing power logic of global digital assets. First, Coinbase, the largest compliant exchange in the US, completed its $2.9 billion acquisition of offshore options giant Deribit. This merger not only signifies the integration of native crypto liquidity by traditional compliant exchanges but also redefines the infrastructure landscape of global derivatives trading. Second, the rise of BlackRock's IBIT ETF options, surpassing Deribit in open interest for the first time at the end of Q3 2025, marks a formal challenge to native crypto platforms by traditional financial capital in volatility pricing power. Prior to this, Deribit enjoyed a near-monopoly, controlling approximately 85% of the global crypto options market share as of the end of 2024.

The involvement of traditional financial institutions became a watershed moment in the options market this year. With the evolution of the US regulatory environment, several Wall Street institutions launched BTC ETFs and their options products. Particularly noteworthy was BlackRock's IBIT, which began offering options trading in November 2024 and rapidly rose to become a new giant in the BTC options market in 2025. Overall, the market landscape in 2025 exhibited a dual-track characteristic: on one hand, crypto-native platforms such as Deribit, and on the other hand, traditional financial channels such as IBIT and ETF options.

BlackRock's IBIT ETF options have risen strongly, posing a direct challenge to Deribit. As a Nasdaq-listed spot BTC ETF, IBIT's options saw a dramatic increase in open interest less than a year after its launch in late 2024. By November 2025, IBIT had become the world's largest BTC options trading platform, dethroning Deribit as the leader for many years. The success of IBIT options highlights the significant influence of traditional financial forces—a large number of institutional investors previously restricted from participating in offshore platforms by regulatory constraints have entered the BTC options market through IBIT, bringing massive amounts of capital and demand. The reputation and compliance framework of large asset management companies like BlackRock behind IBIT have also attracted more conservative institutions to use options for BTC risk management. As of November 2025, IBIT, as the largest spot BTC ETF, managed $84 billion, providing ample spot support and liquidity for the options market, fully demonstrating the strong market demand for spot ETF options.

Aside from Deribit and IBIT, the remaining less than 10% of the BTC options market is divided among exchanges like CME and a few other crypto trading platforms. The Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME), a traditionally regulated venue, offers options trading based on BTC and ETH futures. While CME's market share has increased over the years, it only accounted for approximately 6% of global BTC options open interest (OI) as of Q3 2025. This reflects the limited market appeal of futures-based options compared to more flexible crypto-native platforms and ETF options. Centralized exchanges like Binance and OKX have also attempted to launch BTC and ETH options products in recent years, but user participation has been relatively low. These exchanges primarily focus their derivatives trading on perpetual contracts and futures, with options trading representing only a small portion of their derivatives portfolio. Platforms like Bybit also offer USDC-settled options trading, but their overall market share is similarly limited. Other exchanges, represented by OKX and Binance, collectively contribute only about 7% of BTC options OI. Overall, the crypto options market in 2025 exhibited a highly concentrated landscape: crypto-native platforms (represented by Deribit) continued to dominate non-ETF products such as ETH, while traditional financial platforms (represented by IBIT) rose to prominence in BTC options. This duopoly marginalized other players. Notably, in ETH options, due to the lack of spot ETF options similar to IBIT, Deribit remained virtually the sole center of ETH options liquidity, holding over 90% market share. This meant Deribit's dominance in the ETH options market remained secure in 2025, while IBIT's impact was primarily felt in the BTC sector. Looking ahead, with the approval of ETH spot ETF options in April 2025, it's possible that ETH ETF options will follow suit and gradually enter the competition. However, as of November 2025, the ETH options market remained dominated by crypto-native exchanges, with no traditional institutional competitors like IBIT yet emerging.

DeFi

PerpDEX

2025 was an exceptionally successful year for PerpDEX. Market trading activity exploded, constantly breaking records. Monthly trading volume surpassed $1.2 trillion for the first time in October, and the cumulative on-chain derivatives trading volume for the year reached trillions of dollars. This surge in trading volume and its increased market share were driven by a combination of factors, including performance breakthroughs, rising user demand, and changes in the regulatory environment. Retail investors, institutional trading desks, and venture capital funds all turned their attention to this booming sector in 2025.

Hyperliquid was the undisputed leader in the PerpDEX market in 2025. In the first half of the year, the platform virtually dominated the entire sector, with a market share reaching as high as 70-80%. In May, Hyperliquid's on-chain perpetual contract trading volume peaked at approximately 71%. This astonishing scale made Hyperliquid almost synonymous with the PerpDEX market in the first half of 2025.

Hyperliquid has not only attracted massive trading volume but also accumulated a huge amount of open interest. Data from October 2025 shows that its open interest in perpetual contracts reached $15 billion, accounting for approximately 63% of the total open interest on major decentralized perpetual platforms. This metric indicates that a large amount of capital is choosing to remain on Hyperliquid long-term, reflecting traders' high level of trust in the platform's liquidity and stability.

Unlike traditional Ethereum Level 1 (ETH) blockchains or general-purpose public chains, Hyperliquid has built a custom Layer 1 blockchain specifically designed for high-frequency derivatives trading. This chain employs its proprietary HyperBFT consensus mechanism, capable of processing 200,000 orders per second with a transaction confirmation latency as low as 0.2 seconds. This performance even surpasses many centralized exchanges, making Hyperliquid the first exchange to achieve near-CEX speed and liquidity on-chain. The platform utilizes a fully on-chain Central Limit Order Book (CLOSE) model, ensuring depth and quote quality, allowing professional traders to enjoy a matching experience comparable to traditional exchanges.

Despite Hyperliquid's dominant position in the first half of 2025, the PerpDEX market landscape shifted from a single dominant player to a multi-player competition in the second half due to the strong entry of new entrants. Entering the third and fourth quarters, Hyperliquid's market share saw a significant decline—from approximately 70-80% in the middle of the year to 30-40% by the end. According to on-chain data, Hyperliquid's trading volume share had fallen to approximately 20% in November, while newcomers like Lighter and Aster rapidly emerged: Lighter accounted for approximately 27.7% that month, Aster for 19.3%, and another dark horse, EdgeX, reached 14.6%. This means that the market, once dominated by Hyperliquid, evolved into a multi-player competitive landscape within just a few months. High trading incentives, differentiated product strategies, and capital support fueled the rise of these challengers, and competition in the PerpDEX sector intensified in the second half of 2025.

Prediction Market

The crypto prediction market experienced explosive growth in 2025, with total trading volume reaching approximately $52 billion from January to November, significantly exceeding the peak level during the 2024 US presidential election.

As the world's largest prediction market platform by trading volume, Polymarket's cumulative trading volume exceeded $23 billion in 2025. The platform boasts nearly 60,000 daily active users, almost tripling since the beginning of the year; peak monthly active users are estimated to have exceeded 450,000, demonstrating a significant increase in public participation. Currently, Polymarket has approximately 1.35 million registered trading users, reflecting the rapid expansion of its user base over the past year. This large user base and abundant liquidity have enabled single contracts in several popular markets to achieve cumulative trading volumes in the hundreds of millions of dollars. The highly liquid markets can accommodate tens of millions of dollars in inflows and outflows without significant slippage. In scenarios with high liquidity, clearing capabilities, and well-defined events, prediction market prices are often used as a supplementary indicator. It has been reported that during the US presidential election in November 2024, Polymarket's daily trading volume reached nearly $400 million, accurately predicting the election results, in contrast to the biases of traditional polls. This example highlights the information aggregation capabilities and pricing accuracy of decentralized prediction markets in major events, laying the foundation for their further mainstream adoption in 2025.

Web3 wallet

As the first point of contact between users and the decentralized network, the strategic importance of Web3 wallets underwent a fundamental leap in 2025. Wallets are no longer just containers for private keys or simple transfer tools, but have evolved into on-chain traffic portals that integrate digital identity (DID), asset management, decentralized application (DApp) operating systems, and social graphs.

Looking back over the past five years, the form of Web3 wallets has undergone dramatic evolution. Early wallets required users to have a high level of technical knowledge, managing mnemonic phrases, understanding gas fee mechanisms, and manually configuring the network. This high barrier to entry led to a huge user churn rate; data shows that over 50% of users abandoned the wallet setup process due to its complexity. The most significant industry characteristic this year is the large-scale implementation of Account Abstraction and the standardization of Chain Abstraction technology. The integration of these two technologies has enabled Web3 wallets to, for the first time, rival Web2 financial applications in terms of user experience. Complex private key management, obscure gas fee mechanisms, and fragmented multi-chain liquidity are being encapsulated by intelligent backend protocols, reducing user-perceived friction to an all-time low.

At the same time, the entry of institutional funds has forced the upgrade of wallet security architecture. The combination of multi-party computation (MPC) technology and trusted execution environment (TEE) has become the standard for leading wallets, completely changing the fragile security model where private keys are everything.

In the 2025 market landscape characterized by one dominant player and numerous strong competitors, OKX Web3 Wallet, with its combination of technological innovation and a comprehensive ecosystem, leads the industry in both ease of use and functional integration, and is widely recognized as the overall leader in the sector. As a super aggregator of Web3 gateways, OKX Wallet boasts over 5 million monthly active users. Its core design philosophy lies in encapsulating complex on-chain logic within a minimalist interface. Through a unified dashboard, users can easily manage assets distributed across more than 100 public chains without manually adding contracts.

Meanwhile, OKX Web3 wallet is one of the earliest products in the industry to deeply integrate a DEX aggregator. While many other wallets are still supporting single-chain on-chain swap functionality, OKX wallet has already integrated multi-chain transaction aggregation within the wallet itself. Its built-in OKX DEX aggregator covers more than 100 public chains, automatically finding the best trading path for users through intelligent routing. After a user initiates an exchange request within the wallet, the aggregator simultaneously calls multiple DEX quotes and splits the route to ensure the transaction is executed at the best price and with the lowest slippage.

Besides long-standing industry leaders like OKX Wallet, 2025 saw the emergence of many new players, such as Binance Wallet. Binance Wallet's meteoric rise in 2025 was primarily driven by its Binance Alpha growth strategy: embedding early-stage project discovery and trading directly into the wallet, allowing users to participate in early-stage projects, airdrops, and TGE through a path similar to centralized products. The official positioning of Alpha is closer to a "discovery and screening pool for pre-listed projects," emphasizing transparency and participation in the process, and transforming on-chain participation into more frequent trading and retention through task-based and equity-based mechanisms. This Alpha-driven wallet growth is clearly reflected in the data.

In 2025, Bitget Wallet bet on PayFi, bridging on-chain wealth management with real-world consumption, and advancing its Wallet Card. Gasfree's GetGas covers multi-chain gas payments and supports Google/Apple/email social logins. It natively integrates with RWA platforms like Ondo, enabling trading of tokenized US stocks, while also offering QR code and card payments, stablecoin wealth management Plus, and its flagship product is the Everyday Finance app.

Summarize

The main theme of the crypto derivatives market in 2025 is the shift from highly leveraged retail speculation to repricing driven by the parallel evolution of institutional capital, compliant infrastructure, and on-chain technology. Macro liquidity will determine the trend, with crypto experiencing amplified volatility due to high beta amid expectations of interest rate cuts and shifts in risk appetite. Geopolitical factors and policies will provide triggers. During the deleveraging phase throughout the year, the exogenous shock in October, coupled with crowded leverage in the third quarter, caused the total open interest (OI) to retreat by more than $70 billion from its peak in two days, resulting in a liquidation peak of tens of billions of dollars.

With a total annual trading volume of approximately $85.7 trillion on the CEX side, OI (Online Inquiry), depth, and custody are highly concentrated among leading platforms. While these platforms improve price discovery and execution efficiency, they also amplify compliance, operational, and technical issues into systemic risks. With declining inventory and thinning order books, this concentration simultaneously amplifies the marginal push for price increases and the liquidity vacuum during downturns. Extreme liquidations expose the fragility of the margin-liquidation-insurance fund-ADL chain: when insurance funds are under pressure and cross-platform transfers are congested, the opaque execution of ADL and deviating from market prices for position reductions can dismantle hedging legs, passively transforming neutral portfolios into directional risks. Risk control needs to undergo stress testing again, focusing on liquidation mechanisms and fund accessibility. Institutionalization is more concentrated in exchange-traded derivatives and DAT: CME has introduced compliant innovations such as spot-quoted futures, promoting the normalization of basis trading and connecting ETF spot demand with futures hedging into a replicable arbitrage chain; DAT, driven by accounting and financing tools, forms a balance sheet allocation/financing flywheel, with buying pressure becoming more "locked in," but the risk focus has shifted from coin price to financing structure, corporate governance, and regulatory impact. Pricing power in the options market is also shifting, with mergers and acquisitions of compliant exchanges and the rise of ETF options causing BTC volatility flows to concentrate in traditional financial channels. In the DeFi space, PerpDEX, relying on high-performance application chains and intent-centric architecture, is approaching the CEX experience and moving towards multi-player competition, while the account/chain abstraction of prediction markets and wallets moves discovery, trading, and distribution forward to the application layer.

In summary, the current derivatives market presents distinct structural opportunities and asymmetric risks: opportunities primarily lie in the low-risk basis arbitrage opportunities arising from the integration of compliant spot trading and derivative instruments (such as ETF options), and the functional substitution of traditional centralized liquidity by high-performance on-chain infrastructure (PerpDEX); while risks are highly concentrated in the potential for a reversal in the financing logic of the DAT sector, leading to a double whammy of equity and cryptocurrency price declines, and the systemic risk of liquidation due to liquidity mismatch of tail assets in a highly centralized CEX clearing system. Looking ahead to 2026, with the accelerated convergence of global regulatory frameworks and the potential shift in the liquidity environment, the core competitiveness of the market will focus on whether the trading infrastructure can maintain clearing resilience in an extremely crowded leveraged chain, and whether capital can find the most efficient flow path between compliance and decentralization.

Deribit高管：本周五将有名义价值达18.65亿美元的ETH期权持仓到期

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