AD Derivs: Insights from Crypto Option Traders

Today we talk with DK and Tolga from DeFi Options protocol Premia. 

Premia is now on their version 3 protocol release. 
Their platform provides a broad tradable offering including orderbook, RFQ, AMM/Pool and vaults. Users also have the rare flexibility to "spin-up" new option pools. 

We also explore DK and Tolga's backgrounds before jumping into crypto and building Premia. 

Lastly, we close out with their favorite books. 

Born in Queens, New York, Terence An graduated from Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science and spent the next six years as a trader at Hudson River Trading.

After working on their more traditional US Equities HFT desk, he spent two years developing ultra-low latency strategies, situating him closer to the infrastructure, and ultimately sparking his interest in designing financial markets.

The transition to DeFi protocol design was swift and now he runs Itos Finance, the first protocol to empower anyone with access to structured products entirely on chain.

Itos is launching their testnet and raising a seed round in September 2023. In his spare time Terence likes to climb, cycle, reattempt his topology textbook, and when possible he spends time living abroad. However, his favorite pastime is of course displacing traditional finance.

For more information about Itos visit: https://www.itos.fi/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/itos_fi

Stephan Lutz is the CEO and CFO of BitMEX. He initially joined the company in 2021 as the CFO and was appointed as the group's CEO during late 2022 - one of crypto's most colourful periods. Stephan has been instrumental in driving the exchange's position as one of the crypto derivatives market leaders. It is under his direction that the decision was made for BitMEX to pivot back to its successful origins, with an emphasis placed upon providing professional and institutional traders with a derivatives trading platform that caters to their key needs of liquidity, performance and reliability.

Before BitMEX, he was a Senior Partner at PwC for close to a decade, where he advised many of the world's largest financial institutions. Prior to PwC, he held senior positions with Deutsche Börse. His career began in corporate finance and equities trading at Dresdner Bank AG (now Commerzbank AG). Stephan is married with twin boys and enjoys competing in dance in his leisure time.

Gordon is the managing director of sales and trading over at Genesis Trading.

Genesis launched the first OTC bitcoin trading desk in 2013. Since then, has grown to facilitate hundreds of billions in annual transactions.

Before joining Genesis Trading, Gordon was the director of derivatives at NWI, spending  a little over 8-years there. Gordon has vast experience trading volatility in various asset classes and macro environments.

Today we talk about Gordon's background, option pricing nuances and the current crypto volatility landscape. 

Gordon's Book Picks:
1) The Market Wizards
2) Investment Biker
3) The man who solved the market

LinkedIn
Gordon Grant

SOMA.Finance is a fully compliant DEX with AML/KYC infrastructure to allow users to both trade digital assets but also invest and launch new protocols/tokens. 

Today we talk with Will Corkin, the co-founder of SOMA.Finance to discuss all the functionality of SOMA, the scheduled token launch and future roadmap. 

Will also discusses his background and his career prior to SOMA. 

For more information visit: https://www.soma.finance/about-us

Simon Ho is the founder and CEO of T3 Index.
T3 has created a competitor to the CBEO VIX index, known as the "Spike" index which is a volatility index derived from SPY options and currently traded on MIAX (Miami Stock Exchange)

Simon has an extensive background in options trading.
Before founding T3 Simon worked at JPM, Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs and  Deustsche Bank.

Today we talk about Simon's experience as a trader, founder and developments around T3's Bitcoin volatility index, known as "BitVol".

To learn more about T3 visit: https://t3index.com/

Thalex is a new derivatives exchange offering perpetuals, futures and future options on both BTC and ETH.

Visit: https://www.thalex.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ThalexGlobal

Today we speak with Hendrik Ghys, one of the co-founders of Thalex Exchange. 
We journey into Hendrik's career in Crypto, including his experience valuing Bitstamp for acquisition. 
We talk about the economics of a crypto exchange as well as the option like pay-off this type business implicitly resembles. 

We chat about the features that Thalex offers, such as "delta-one rolls" and how this type of innovation can create liquidity. 

We also discuss the crypto vol. landscape and some of the players in the space. 

Panoptic is a new approach to DeFi options.
We explore Guillaume's journey from Physics into DeFi Options, as well as his academic background.
 
We talk about protocol specifics, such as the embedded optionality of Uniswap V3 positions and how those can be translated into a DeFi option protocol.

More about Panoptic:
The Panoptic protocol enables the minting, trading, and market-making of perpetual put and call options. All smart contracts are available 24/7 and users can interact with the Panoptic protocol without the need for intermediaries like banks, brokerage firms, clearinghouses, market makers, or centralized exchanges.

Website: https://panoptic.xyz/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/panoptic_xyz
Docs: https://panoptic.xyz/docs/intro

Numoen is a new approach to DeFi options. 
We talk about protocol specifics with co-founder, Kyle Scott.

Numoen, an application for interacting with the Power Market Maker Protocol (PMMP), allows any user to hedge their Uniswap V3 LP position in three simple clicks. 

PMMP is a suite of non-upgradable smart contracts that function without any trusted intermediaries. The protocol is designed for taking two underlying assets and creating a derivative asset with constant leverage, referred to as "Power Tokens". As a fully autonomous protocol, there are no admin functions and zero external dependencies.


Twitter: https://twitter.com/numoen
Docs: https://docs.numoen.com/
Website: https://www.numoen.com/

David Brickell is the Director of Institutional Sales at Paradigm, the RFQ block trading platform for crypto options. 

We explore David's background as an economist and roles on the FX desks of various banks. We touch on his position at Lehman Brothers during the 2008 financial crisis. 

David shares his current insights into the macro environment along with his ideas around BTC, ETH and crypto vol.