Options

Options on 1024EX are cash-settled contracts in USDC. Buying one gives you the right to a payout at expiry if the underlying finishes in the money; it never involves delivery of the underlying, a brokerage account, or an options approval level.

Roughly 24,000 live contracts across 106 underlyings — BTC plus US equities and ETFs — listed on weekly and monthly expiries, with strikes kept stocked around the money as the underlying moves.

Reading a contract

AAOI-20260925-93-C      AAOI, expiring 25 Sep 2026, strike 93, call
BTC-20260925-81000-C    BTC, expiring 25 Sep 2026, strike 81,000, call

Ticker, expiry date (UTC), strike, then C for call or P for put.

The two facts that make these different

1. The payout is capped. Every contract publishes a maximum payout per unit. For a put that is the strike — a put can never be worth more than the strike. For a call the cap also defaults to the strike, so a long call behaves like a capped call spread rather than an unbounded long. The exchange states this openly: the Greeks published on the chain are labelled capped_call_spread for exactly this reason. Price accordingly — a far out-of-the-money call cannot pay off "infinitely".

2. Writers post the full payout as collateral. Selling to open locks the maximum payout × quantity in USDC for the life of the contract. There is no margin offset, no naked short, and no possibility of a writer being unable to pay. Writing is also gated: an account must be on the writer allowlist to sell to open. Selling to close a long you already hold is always available.

For a buyer the consequence is simple: your maximum loss is the premium you paid, and the payout you are owed is already collateralized on the other side.

Prices, marks and implied vol

Each contract publishes a mark price independent of its order book, plus an implied volatility and the standard Greeks (delta, gamma, vega, theta per day). The mark is what your unrealized PnL, your risk and your stop triggers are computed from.

Where an external vendor quote exists, the mark is the vendor mid. Where it does not — BTC, for example — the mark is model-priced from the venue's own volatility surface. Two practical consequences:

• A contract can show a valid mark with no bids or offers. That is normal, not an error.
• Quotes are often one-sided, especially on cheap contracts: below roughly $0.11 of premium, the quoting floor and the tick grid make a two-sided quote impossible. Deep out-of-the-money and near-expiry contracts frequently trade below their model mark.

When you take liquidity, bound it. An options market order without a slippage limit is bounded only by a ±30% band around mark — a fat-finger guard, not an execution guard.

Trading hours and the expiry window

Contracts on equity underlyings are session-bound: they trade during their underlying's market session. BTC contracts trade continuously.

In the last 5 minutes before expiry, no new positions may be opened on a contract. Closing trades stay available. This prevents a position being opened into a price that is already effectively fixed.

Exits

A long options position can carry a take-profit and a stop-loss — quoted on the underlying's price, not on the option premium. For a BTC 81,000 call, a take-profit at 90,000 means "close this when BTC trades through 90,000".

That is deliberate. An option's premium moves with spot, with volatility and with time; a premium-referenced stop fires on a volatility repricing that has nothing to do with the view you took. Anchoring exits to the underlying keeps them expressing the trade you actually made.

Expiry, exercise and settlement

At expiry, every open position settles automatically in USDC. Nothing to claim, no assignment notice, no action required:

payout per unit = min( intrinsic value , maximum payout )

  call:  max(0, settlement price − strike)
  put:   max(0, strike − settlement price)

Longs receive the payout less a settlement fee; writers keep whatever remains of their collateral. If a market is voided rather than settled, writers get their full collateral back and no payout is made.

Before expiry, contracts are American-style: you may exercise manually at any time while the contract is live. Exercise requires a fresh underlying price, and for equity underlyings it additionally requires a healthy market session — a closed equity feed re-publishing Friday's close looks "fresh" on a Sunday, so freshness alone is not accepted as a gate.

Fees

Your account's actual numbers, including VIP tier, can be quoted before you trade.

Risks specific to options

• Time decay is not optional. Theta is published per day; a position that is right about direction and wrong about timing still loses.
• Model marks are not quotes. On underlyings without vendor pricing, a mark is a model's opinion. Cheap, near-expiry contracts can carry marks well above where anyone will actually trade.
• Thin books. Assume you may not be able to close at mark. Size positions so that holding to expiry is an acceptable outcome.
• The payout cap limits the upside of long calls — check maximum payout before modelling a return.

Programmatic access: Options: contracts, Options: market data, Options: trading and Options: exercise and settlement.