Derivatives Platforms

If you trade crypto options at any size, you trade on Deribit — there is no second venue with a comparable surface. This review is about whether that dominance is deserved, and what it costs you.

For a decade, on-chain derivatives meant accepting worse fills in exchange for self-custody. Hyperliquid closed most of that gap, and then demonstrated exactly where the remaining trust assumption lives.

dYdX made the hard version of a choice most protocols only make rhetorically: it actually handed the order book to a validator set. The principle held. The volume did not entirely follow.

Drift's cross-margin engine is the most capital-efficient thing on Solana and the most dangerous. Both statements are about the same feature.

GMX inverts the usual trade-off: instead of paying slippage on entry, you pay a borrow fee for every hour you hold. Whether that is cheap depends entirely on how long you intend to be right.

Aevo is doing something hard and worth doing — on-chain options with a usable interface. It is also thin enough that the honest advice is to size small and check the spread before every trade.

Every perpetual swap traded anywhere descends from a contract BitMEX designed. That is a real legacy and it is not, by itself, a reason to open an account in 2026.