Rysk：如何通过 DeFi 期权一键赚取稳定币收益｜DeFi 前沿

In 2024, basically what happened is that the only way to access income from options or to get option strategies or yield, as you mentioned, was through sophisticated exchanges. There was no easy way to access it, and what we realized is that options—especially covered calls and cash-secured puts—are among the most-used strategies in TradFi and also in crypto. We were talking to most of the options desks out there, most of the funds and so on, and they were all doing this. We were like, why isn't there a way to do this in DeFi? It doesn't make any sense, right?

Looking back on 2024, our thesis was simple: this is one of the main products, and no one is actually doing it right now. Why aren't they doing it, and why didn't the previous experiments work?

Dan, thank you for joining us. How are you doing?

Doing great. Thanks for having me. I'm a big fan of The Edge Podcast. I'm really excited to be here. I feel like I've made it, you know? Thanks for having me.

That's awesome, man. I'm excited to talk to you, too, about Rysk. I've been writing up Rysk in Yields of the Week, this weekly column that I write, for a while now, honestly. I think you've managed to package options in a way that's very intuitive for people like me. I call myself a retail user, so we're going to talk all about that.

1. Starting Rysk

We're going to talk about the state of options in DeFi, what exactly Rysk is and what you're offering, what options yield will mean for DeFi going forward, and what's coming next with Rysk. Before we get into all that, Dan, you're new to the show, so why don't you introduce yourself a bit? What were you doing before Rysk?

I'm the co-founder of Rysk. Before that, starting from the beginning, my first job was in investment banking. I was doing corporate debt at Bank of America Merrill Lynch back in 2011 or 2012, something like that. I quit the job and left finance—I got banking and bureaucracy out of that—and started to build my own company.

We were building education software as a service in Web3. I got excited about crypto around 2016 or 2017. I was living in Berlin, and Ethereum—you can imagine all the excitement around that. To me, I was a developer back then, and it was basically a way to do even cooler stuff in finance, right?

I kept working on my company, but around 2020, I realized, okay, this thing is too exciting right now. Now you can really build financial applications, banking stuff like that. COVID also came to Italy, and even in Italy, it was one of the worst places. I couldn't leave my place, so that was the perfect focus to get into crypto stuff.

I'm pretty sure I saw a DeFi Dad tweet about Opyn, an options protocol. That happened after I got liquidated on MakerDAO. If you remember that massive liquidation event in 2020, I thought, options are useful as insurance here, right?

I got deep into Opyn, became very good friends with the team, and started to work with them. Since then, I never left options. Rysk started around 2023, so it's been quite a long time.

The original idea was to build an options AMM using the Opyn infrastructure. My idea was, okay, I love Opyn, and now I'm trying to build something on top to bring liquidity to the protocol. That's how I started Rysk.

We co-founded it. We met on the Opyn Discord, which is one of the beautiful stories that happened during these years, and we started to brainstorm ideas. We ended up building this—or at least the first version of what Rysk is today.

2. Why DeFi options failed before and what Rysk does differently

Actually, can we take a step back and talk about the status quo for options yield in DeFi? What is that today, and what is Rysk working to change and offer to its users?

Let's take a step back here. At the end of 2024, we were basically at a point where we didn't have a product. The first version of our options AMM didn't work out. It was very hard to get users.

At the end of 2024, we were in the phase of, okay, should we give up? We tried, it didn't work. It was sort of a failure. Or should we decide to focus on a hole that we found in the system back then?

The only way to access income from options, or to access option strategies or yield, as you mentioned, was through sophisticated exchanges. There was no easy way to access it. What we realized is that products like Ribbon or Set ended up being shut down or closed.

Options, especially covered calls and cash-secured puts, are some of the most-used strategies in TradFi but also in crypto. We had been talking to most of the options desks out there, most of the foundations and so on, and they were all doing this. We were like, why isn't there a way to do this in DeFi? It doesn't make any sense, right?

Looking back on 2024, our thesis was simple: this is one of the main products, and no one is actually doing it right now. Why aren't they doing it, and why didn't the previous experiments work?

What we realized is that all the previous experiments were packaged as ETFs, right? At the end, it was like a hedge fund: you deposit, and someone runs the strategy for you. Usually, it was very systematic or something like that.

What we realized was, should we be able to build a product that's in the middle between an ETF, where someone is running the strategy for you, and a purely options exchange with all the quant mechanics and sophistication?

As a user, you should be able to select your strike price and expiry and build your own custom product. It's not someone else doing it for you, but you should be able to do that very easily, in one click, in a way that you understand exactly what's going on without being an options nerd, right?

That's basically the space where we started to build this new product that we call the Rysk Protocol, and we launched it about a year ago now.

So, what is the status today? The product that we launched a year ago is working. Right now, I think we have $60 million in TVL, and for us, TVL is a very interesting metric because at expiry, we settle all the positions and send the money back to the user.

Every Friday, our TVL goes back to a low level, and then we see how big it gets. So, basically, $60 million means that this is the TVL we accumulated in the last two weeks or so. That's pretty impressive, at least for us, coming back from a year ago when we didn't have a product.

The product is working. We have users. We have 90% retention of funds. Every Friday, basically 90% of the funds that get back are from existing users. Our users love the idea of rolling over those positions with new terms and so on.

Back to your original question, today our product, Rysk, is probably the easiest way to build a strategy that generates yield or income from options. There are alternatives, yes. You can use options exchanges, but usually those products have more complexity and less flexibility.

What I mean by flexibility is not in terms of strikes or expiries, but, for example, in terms of assets.

With Rysk, you can use any collateral. We even have covered call and put funds. You don't have that on there, you know what I mean. There are things that we designed the protocol specifically for this use case.

So, the status today is, if you're looking to generate income from covered calls and cash-secured puts, Rysk is the product optimized and designed just for that use case. There are other products that are more generalizable, and you can get there. The third way to do that today is going OTC. You call a desk—Wintermute, Galaxy, whatever—and you can basically trade with them.

3. Demo of Rysk cash secured puts

The issue with that is it's not that accessible, obviously, and most of the time you need to send your collateral, so you have massive counterparty risk. Obviously, with Wintermute and Galaxy, they're all great; they're not going to blow up. But it still happened with Alameda in the past, right? So, if you don't want to take that counterparty risk and you want to do something very accessible, Rysk is the play.

So, Daniele, you're starting to touch on the actual offerings and the nuts and bolts of how Rysk works. Something I've written up in Yields of the Week is these cash-secured puts. I think they're really interesting, especially for the market that we're in right now.

I actually think it's potentially a cool way to dip-buy. If you could pull your screen up and walk through one of these cash-secured put scenarios so people can see the yields, that would be awesome. We can put a picture to this.

Yeah, let me do it. Cash-secured puts are a funny story because when we launched the product, we already had covered calls, and then a lot of you asked for cash-secured puts. So, it's basically a community-driven thing.

The way cash-secured puts work is you deposit a stablecoin and decide which asset you want to buy at a cheaper price. As an example, you see my screen here: we have BTC, ETH, or HYPE. Let's go with HYPE, and I'm going to select USDH, the native stablecoin of Hyperliquid.

What happens with this is that we keep the UI super simple. This doesn't look anything like an options exchange that you might be used to, and that's the innovation that we brought to the space. We try to simplify this process and ask a simple question: at which price are you happy to buy HYPE, for example, on May 1st, which is 15 days out?

We already show 6 prices—6 strike prices. HYPE is right now at $44.32. Let's say you're willing to buy at $40.50 and you think that's a good price. You can deposit the stablecoin, in this case USDH, and you're earning 45% right now, which is the premium that you get up front.

In this case, you're going to get $40 deposited into your account, and annualized, it's 44%. The APR is purely the premium that you get up front, annualized. So, you deposit, receive the up-front premium, and then we focus a lot on what happens on May 1st.

May 1st is expiry day, and there are 2 scenarios. One is that the price is below what you selected, which is $40.50, and you receive 50 HYPE. Effectively, you're buying 50 HYPE at $40.50. If the price is above that, you get your collateral back. In both cases, you obviously keep the premium.

Users are doing this strategy right now, and this is the main strategy of Rysk. I think almost 60% of TVL is cash-secured puts on BTC and HYPE. The way users think about this is, “I'm looking for yield on my stablecoin, and I'm actually willing, in the long term, to hold HYPE or BTC. I don't mind if the price dumps, because I'm going to buy it. In the meantime, I'm trying to collect yield on my stablecoin.”

This strategy has become very popular recently. It's our main strategy, and it's very easy to understand. The fact that we made it physically settled enables the user to basically do nothing. At expiry, the user is going to receive HYPE if the price is below the strike, or just receive USDH or other stablecoins back.

This is one of the main products right now, and the main reason it took off is that yield in DeFi has compressed a lot. Earning, in this case, 45% APR, purely based on income generated from volatility, is a very good opportunity in this market. Yields are low, volatility is high, and this is a very good product to earn from that.

Covered calls, just to give you an idea—I’m not going to focus on all of it today—are the other way around. You deposit HYPE, and you're willing to sell at a higher price. In this case, you deposit HYPE, you're willing to sell at $48, and you receive the premium up front.

Then, on May 1st, if the price is above $48, you're going to receive USDT. It's a take-profit type of product. If it's below that, you get your collateral back, which is HYPE. That's it.

4. What market conditions would be more ideal for covered calls?

Dan, thanks for walking us through that. It's so simple, and I mean that in a good way, but it's also very powerful. As you were explaining that, I was wondering: do you think cash-secured puts have been so popular because we've been in this bearish market regime where, arguably, I hope we're near the bottom, and people are starting to use cash-secured puts for dip-buying?

Conversely, in a different market regime—or what type of market—do you think covered calls would take over and overtake the popularity of cash-secured puts?

Yeah, that's a good question. I have a partial answer based on what I see from users. On cash-secured puts, you're right. Right now, on certain assets, people are willing to buy them because BTC and HYPE, for most people, are good assets, and they're okay holding those assets over time.

In a bear market, that's a pretty good strategy. They try to buy the dip. In the meantime, they have cash in stablecoins, and they try to hold stablecoins. What happens in a purely bullish market, where people probably don't even want stablecoins and are just purely leveraged? That's when covered calls might be interesting on certain assets.

For example, what I've seen is that on BTC, people like to do covered calls because the move is somehow expected. I don't know how to say it—you know it's not going to do a 20% pump overnight with BTC right now. On BTC, for example, a covered call is a very good way of earning from certain assets.

In that case, the psychological mindset is slightly different. On the classic put, I've seen people who want to get exercised. They want to buy at the strike. When it comes to covered calls, it's the opposite: people don't want to get exercised.

With a covered call, the psychological aspect is, “I'm making a bet that the price doesn't hit that level. BTC is at $75, and I don't think it's going to be at $80, so I'll get into $80.” What changes there is that people get more into the speculation aspect, especially with covered calls.

With other assets, users are actually okay selling. Keep in mind that some users have funds. For example, there are some liquid funds that have assets, and they're fine selling at that price. It would be above their entry price, so in the meantime they're trying to earn this income. If they sell at that price, that's fine for them.

I guess it all depends on the asset. If you ask anyone in the HYPE community, no one probably wants to sell HYPE here. On the covered call, they're trying to do this: “I'm speculating that it's not going to hit that point.” If you ask Ethereum users, that tells you a lot about where the sentiment is: “I'm fine to sell at $2,500.”

A lot depends on the asset and where the momentum is. One thing I haven't mentioned is that it also depends on volatility. If volatility is high, obviously you get paid a very good premium. It depends on the level of volatility and what premium you're going to get for entering that trade.

At the end of the day, it's one question: is the APR exciting enough to sell HYPE at $45? That's basically it. Again, different users, different use cases.

5. Rysk targets a different user than Derive

Funny enough, we just had Nick Forster, the founder and CEO of Deribit, and we were asking him about the success Deribit has been having in terms of trading volume on its decentralized options exchange. What's the outlook for someone to build vaults or make buying and selling options easier?

It seems like you would be complementary. Do you see yourself as potentially competitors, or are you more likely to be partners with an exchange like Deribit?

That's a good question. I know Nick, and I met him in Osaka a month ago. We had dinner and so on. The view when we think about this is that we've been in this industry together for so many years, and we've seen options struggling all the time.

If you ask both of us, all we care about is that we want options to grow.

Like, we want this pie to grow. We have 2 completely different approaches. For them, they're fighting that a bit, and that's fine. For us, we're not trying to fight that a bit; we're trying to give a very simple use case for options, which is generating income.

What we're trying to do is follow this into composability, having many assets. When I show the screenshot, for example, you can use a covered call using 3 different types of staking assets on ETH. So, we took the approach of saying that everything we design is purely: I have an asset, and I'm trying to earn on top of it. It's very simple with these 2 options strategies.

An option exchange is completely different. I give it to the people you're targeting—the sophisticated actors, the people who actually want to enter a trade—and it's a completely different beast. Obviously, some things can be done on both platforms, but that's the one difference, I would say: we have users who, for example, when we started this new product, were saying, “I'm not going to touch an option. I tried in the past, it didn't work, and I got burned.”

We figured out that there was a negative bias when it came to options, so we had to do an incredible amount of work to say that we needed to oversimplify this. If you go to our UI, we don't even mention that it's an option, and that's on purpose because people have a negative bias. It's like, “I'm not going to touch options.” More than half of our users were doing an options trade with Switcheo Rysk for the first time.

So, if you ask what the point of Rysk is, it's accessibility. We're trying to make this very easy for people who have never touched an option. If you're doing an options exchange, your target is probably completely different. You're targeting sophisticated users who want the maximum flexibility out of it. I think what we're trying to do is make options mainstream.

If no one was able to do that in DeFi, probably Ribbon, with their vault system—which, at the end of the day, was a poorly designed product because it was losing users money over time—shows the challenge. What we're trying to do is fix that with a novel structured product, which is a hybrid between an exchange and an options strategy. We're trying to make that mainstream. We want everyone to be able to enter a trade and know exactly what happens and when. That's basically what we're doing, and so far, that's what I would use to select the proper product.

Yeah, really interesting. I find that when you talk to people who have traded options all their lives, they talk to you like, “What do you mean you don't get it? It's so easy.” It's kind of annoying because I think there's definitely this fear of options for people who haven't really dabbled in them. I'm not surprised to hear that more than 50% of your users were making their first foray into options. I didn't even know that you don't mention the word “option” on the site. That's interesting as well.

6. Who’s using Rysk?

I want to dive a bit more into your users, though. I'm assuming there are a lot of retail users, like myself and DeFi Dad, but are there people you would say are more sophisticated users as well on the platform? Are there liquid funds? What is the overall makeup of your users on Rysk?

7. Closing

There's some sort of misconception about our product. People think it's purely retail, or that it's for people who don't know what they're doing. In reality, most of our users are whales and DeFi power users. We have liquid funds. We built a product on top of Rysk that we can talk about later if you want, but it's basically a vault infrastructure. The first user of that is actually a DeFi fund, which is a treasury on top of Hyperliquid, and this is a Nasdaq-listed entity.

We're talking about purely institutional users. We have a few more coming on the institutional side, so we actually have institutions running those strategies. The average user—for example, the minimum position we have on Rysk is actually $2K. It's not high; it's not insanely high, but we don't have users trying the product with $10. The minimum is $3K.

It is retail in the sense that our users are DeFi users and power users, but not retail in the sense of bond-fund traders. Those are our main users. They're people who have assets. Sometimes they're sophisticated in terms of the assets they have. At some point, we even enabled a Pendle PT token as collateral because users were asking for it. They were using Pendle, so they had their asset and realized they could use it as collateral on Rysk, and they wanted that integration.

We're talking about users who know what they're doing, but they don't want to spend too much time trying to understand everything about options. For them, it's as simple as, “Okay, I know what happens in that case, right? At expiry on May 1st, the price is going to be below the upper bound. That's what I care about. I don't need to care about anything else.” I would say they're sophisticated users in some ways. We have liquid funds, and they just don't want to sit there thinking about the Greeks and so on. They want something extremely simple.

Right now, they're doing that with OTC desks. You call them on Telegram and ask for a price. They give you the price; if you like it, you send them collateral, and at the end of the trade, they're going to call you back and say, “Here's your collateral back.” We took that whole process—onboarding, using Telegram, sending collateral, and so on—and put it into a single button in a single UI. That's basically what we've done here.

Before this, I was at Cega with a treasury, and they sold calls from their treasuries. They were looking for an on-chain venue. We're not talking about a high level of sophistication, but about people who do treasury management. Those are our users today.

8. Addressing criticisms of Rysk's premium

Very cool. Dan, I want to ask you about something I saw on X. I saw some people trying to analyze the difference between Rysk and Derive, and they were making the case that they think the premium on Rysk is way higher. It was this more sophisticated-options type of persona I was talking about earlier, where they're like, “Why don't you just do this yourself?”

First of all, I want to know if you think that's true—if there is a spread, maybe what it is, or where you take profit as well. This whole conversation reminded me of Ethena and people like veteran traders saying, “Why don't you just do the basis trade yourself? It's easy.” For a guy like me, I'm like, “No, I'm just not. I would much rather get it through Ethena.” I don't know if that's a fair comparison, but I'd like your take on that. Also, how does Rysk make money, and is there any validity to having a bigger spread than Deribit or something like that?

Yeah, no. Thanks for bringing this up because it's been discussed a lot. Generally, we're builders and just like to build, so we take all of those discussions as feedback. Then we converge and say, “Okay, we need to improve or build better.” Rysk is an RFQ system.

At the end of the process, when you click the button, the strike price on the UI is actually a two-sided option. We have a few option desks on the other side, and they price the option on the fly. As you can imagine, pricing an option within 2 seconds means that those guys have built their own volatility infrastructure, their own volatility surface, and everything like that.

The thing about the premium is, when I see someone say that Rysk is always going to have worse premiums, it doesn’t make any sense to me. At the end of the day, it’s all about whether you’re able to onboard desks, market makers, and traders on the other side of the RFQ. It’s just an RFQ system, right? There’s no structural reason or design at the protocol level that we shouldn’t have good premiums.

That’s a misconception to me. When I was reading those things, I was like, “Okay, that doesn’t make any sense,” because, again, we’re operating as an exchange here. It’s all about whether we can attract significant liquidity.

On attracting liquidity, a bit of background: when I mentioned building a product in 2024, we had this idea, we built the product, and I reached out to most of the market makers I knew. I was like, “Hey, we’re building this product. You guys should integrate.” As you can imagine, the reply from all of them was, “No. How’s that going to work? We’re not going to waste our resources here.”

It was very hard to get even a single market maker to say, “Let’s try this together. At least I believe we’re onto something. I have a thesis.” Since then, we’ve been growing insanely. We launched in June, and we were doing about $1 million in volume per month because everything was gated. In March, we did $180 million.

Now, imagine growing like this and making sure that you have enough market makers on the other side. We’ve done that completely organically. We didn’t do anything on the market-maker side. We didn’t pay any market maker, we don’t have any incentive deal, and we don’t have any liquidity deal—nothing like that.

It takes time to build up all this liquidity. What happened is that, when this Twitter discussion came up, people were saying, “Okay, there’s basically an arbitrage here.” The smartest market makers reached out to me that same day, and they were like, “Guys, is this true? Is there an arbitrage there?” I said, “Well, potentially, because obviously, on certain assets—and again, if you cherry-pick, you can probably find some. Sometimes our market makers price better on the wings or whatever, but it happens. That’s like any exchange, right?”

The market makers realized that there was an opportunity to arbitrage, so they integrated. Within a span of 3 or 4 days, they were even complaining that the arbitrage wasn’t there anymore. Now the prices are aggressive and competitive again.

The TL;DR is that there’s no reason, from a design perspective, that our premiums shouldn’t be better than others. That’s actually our goal. Back to your question about how we make money: we take fees on the premium. Having a higher premium means that we get more users, which means that we get more fees. There’s no reason for us not to have the goal of offering a competitive premium.

My main job today, beyond going on podcasts and all this, is making sure that we attract all those desks and market makers to quote in our organic environment. We could pay one market maker a retainer fee and say, “Okay, go out there and price,” but that’s not a sustainable model, and it’s not what we wanted to build. It takes time, but we’re getting there.

Back to your example about Ethena, there’s definitely something in that as well. Some of our users know that if they have to leave some pips on the table for an easier UI or to choose an option on the fly with only 1 click, that’s fine for them, and they’re happy with it.

There’s also the composability aspect. You can use any collateral. On Ether.fi Liquid, at some point we had an LRT, which is yield-bearing collateral, and we enabled that as collateral. Sixty percent of the supply of the LRT was actually used in Rysk as collateral. If you were a user of an LRT back then, it was one of the coolest products to earn on top of it, right?

There are a lot of reasons for accepting a few pips less. But in reality, from a purely product and design perspective, we’ll get to a point where our premium is as good as anyone else’s. That’s my job and my goal, and that’s what I’m building here.

Yeah, I’ve always wanted to use options more than I do in my portfolio, which is very rarely. Part of the obstacle to using those options has been that I’m not expert enough to do so. I don’t trust myself because I’m not an expert and haven’t traded options.

I think this is such a great example of financial automation, but also of the front end. I recognize the way you’ve packaged and productized the ability to sell options through Rysk. It makes more psychological sense. It puts you at ease when you’re trying to understand how to align your goals and your portfolio with the option strategies that support them.

I would encourage anyone to go to Rysk. You can click around and quickly see, “Oh, okay. I’m basically being guided through when I want to buy or sell an asset.” Based on that, you can potentially get into an options strategy.

I highly recommend it if you’ve never traded options. Again, be extra cautious, read the docs, and take extra time to learn. Hopefully, the podcast helps. This is definitely one of the few times recently that I’ve really wanted to take action with a protocol following the podcast. I feel like there’s a real opportunity here for me to use Rysk myself.

9. What’s next for the Rysk roadmap?

That said, Dan, what else is on the horizon? What should we look forward to in the next 6 to 12 months in terms of Rysk products?

Our approach is always very user-led. We talk to users, hear what’s going on, and try to evolve into that. We have some products that we’ve been cooking and testing that are basically ready. The plan right now is to increase distribution.

Our thesis, as I’ve mentioned multiple times, is that Rysk is not a product for options traders. It’s actually a product for anyone else who wants to use options in a very easy way. Based on that, we started getting demand from institutions. I don’t know if you guys saw it, but I think yesterday Goldman Sachs announced an ETF that’s basically doing covered calls on BTC.

We’ve seen this over the last couple of months. We did the first one with a billion, as I mentioned, and we have a few more coming. We have this product, which is effectively similar to more structured vaults. Anyone can run their own vault. Some of them are permissioned, and if you’re an institution today, my dream is that Goldman Sachs should use the Rysk infrastructure for that.

We build infrastructure, and it’s ready. That’s the long-term plan. What we have right now are protocols, foundations, treasuries, and some institutions using this infrastructure with all the dynamics they need. Sometimes it’s about compliance, and sometimes it’s about whitelisting counterparties.

Rysk is also getting into the institutional side. You don’t see it in the app. In the app, it looks very easy, as I said, but behind that there’s actually a big institutional product.

We’re actively exploring and have already built a UI for more products. For example, HIP-4 on Hyperliquid—I think that’s going to involve prediction markets and binary options. If it’s going to be similar to HIP-3, with permissionless markets and so on, that’s something we’d be very happy with. We definitely have the skills and the community to potentially build around that.

We’re thinking about what other structured products and instruments can be related to this. Again, going back to the original thesis of using options to generate income, that’s all about Rysk. There are many ways to do this with options. What we see with covered calls and cash-secured puts is just a small portion of the options we can give users, so we’re expanding into that.

The last thing—and this was a decision we made at the beginning, something we really believed in—is that we designed the protocol to be composable. If an asset is on-chain, you should be able to run strategies on top of Rysk.

We’re now targeting gold, for example, as the next asset in the pipeline. We’re testing it as we speak. You’ll be able to do covered calls on gold and other tokenized assets. The idea is that if there’s an asset, our platform is flexible and composable enough to let you do covered calls or cash-secured puts on top of it.

So, increasing the number of assets, increasing the number of products, and increasing distribution to institutions with potentially those YieldMax-type ETF products—that's the direction we're taking. The most important thing, as I mentioned before, is we're just trying to get more and more liquidity, because that's the key to effectively having a killer product. If you have the best premium out there, all the assets, and everything like that, to me, I'd be very happy.

Again, 3 years ago, we were completely dead, and the fact that right now I'm discussing this roadmap and we are alive is something I'm very proud of. We're going to keep shipping and building as we thought.

Yeah, what an awesome story. Your pinned tweet shows the TVL in Rysk rocketing upward from July 2025. We've seen so many other builders attempt to make options work in DeFi, and I think we were just too early. You know, years ago, we were talking about the fact that—were you working at Opyn at that point?

I was working with them in 2020, but I started because I was using that as insurance against my MakerDAO liquidation, basically. So, I started because I found a use case, then I loved the product and joined the team.

They were such a great team, but you were battling against the Gensler era. Now things have changed. We have much more pro-crypto regulation, and options are such an important primitive for us to bring on-chain. This interview, combined with what we learned from Nick Forster at Derive, I wholly believe in it. I think 2026 is going to see options trading volume on-chain grow, options open interest grow, and we're just really excited for the work that you guys are doing.

Dan, thank you so much for your time. Again, congratulations on making DeFi options great again, and we want to give you the final word before we go.

That's what I mean. Now I know why you said, “Make DeFi options great again,” because I think I made a tweet a couple of years ago where, at the bottom of our product, it's like—yeah, I think it just reminded me of that. I was like, “Okay, I think we got something into that,” but there's still a lot to do.

Hopefully, this time is the right time. Again, I think we finished in a way that users, at least right now, aren't scared about them anymore. And that's already the first step.