March 22, 2026

Why Crypto Options Are Still In The Early Days w/ Nick Forster

54 minutes

Nick Forster, CEO of Derive joins us to talk about his journey from trading equity options at SIG to building the leading decentralized options platform. Nick talks the shift from AMMs to app chains and why institutional liquidity is moving on-chain. Nick explains Derive's strategy of 'exporting' complex derivatives to 7+ chains and why on-chain transparency is the only fix for centralized OTC risks.

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Notes:

* Captured 90% of on-chain options market share.

* Traditional AMMs yielded 5-10% annually initially.

* RFQ for institutional liquidity.

Timestamps:

00:00 Start

00:19 Nick's background

01:20 History of Options

04:15 The journey toward an L2 App-chain

07:11 The "aggregation of liquidity" thesis

09:40 OTC desks & competitors

13:47 Roadblocks to institutional involvement

16:11 Hyperliquid integration

17:09 HLP

22:09 Perps

27:17 Tap trading vs dice rolls

30:52 Value capture

34:38 EFT options

36:05 Why have perps on Derive?

38:36 Current decentralized trading tech vs tradfi

43:14 Regulations

46:16 RWAs

48:30 Bridging to other chains

50:41 Derive token

52:24 Token holders

The Gwart Show is sponsored by Ellipsis Labs. Ellipsis Labs builds the most efficient on-chain markets. Their orderbook and Prop AMM products have delivered price improvement to hundreds of billions of dollars in retail volume. Now, they are bringing their expertise to build Phoenix, the best on-chain perpetuals platform.

Ellipsis Labs is hiring New York-based engineers. If you're an engineer looking to work with a proven team in making DeFi better, go to ellipsislabs dot xyz slash careers.

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By Blockspace Media

4.8

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