I see this point get brought up a ton and it's actually very valid at first glance so I want to educate everyone, so strap in for a longer post. When you buy or sell options on @DeriveXYZ, Deribit, Paradex, wherever, you're not buying or selling to those platforms, you're trading with and against these "hoe ass market makers", to which we'll shorten to hoe ass mm's. The platforms themselves are just aggregators for hoe ass mm desks to give you quotes. Most of the same hoe ass mm's are on many or all the different platforms. Let's use $85,000 $BTC calls for Oct9 as an example. If you want to go buy a couple calls, you can go hit the resting liquidity in the order book and get very close pricing to what is called "mark". If you look in the order book, you'll see there's bids at $1100, "mark" at $1150, and asks at $1200. Mark pricing is the theoretical price of the option based on Black-Scholes pricing (hoe ass mm math blah blah blah), but it is not necessarily the mid price of what market participants price the option at. Since $BTC is puking right now, hoe ass mm's might be "axed" in the direction to buy $BTC exposure, so they'll give more attractive pricing to sell $BTC and charge more to buy it from them. Different desks may be axed in different directions, but generally, pricing is based on similar formulas and volatility levels. If you want to buy a few hundred $BTC calls instead of just a few, you'll need to go use RFQ instead, otherwise you risk moving the market (slippage) too much yourself, or only executing on one leg of a structure you intended to be multi-leg. When you RFQ, the hoe ass mm is now taking on that slippage because you're essentially slamming a market order. So they widen out their quotes to take this into account. It's important to remember that hoe ass mm's are not just hoe ass mm's, they are also pussy ass mm's, and they aim to be what's called "delta neutral". This means they generally want to just make money by charging spreads and not actually holding the directional exposure being on the other side of these calls would give them. 100 of these $85k calls gives me ~35 $BTC worth of exposure right now, which is exposure they'd need to hedge. As this $85,000 call gets closer to being in the money (🙏), the exposure I get from these calls keeps going up, and they have to keep buying more $BTC at higher and higher prices to remain delta neutral. And if $BTC starts to go down again, they'd sell at lower prices. They are quite literally forced to buy high and sell low in this case. On top of that they are paying fees, potentially disadvantageous funding rates, compute/infrastructure, and just inherently have expenses and a desire to at least earn more than a risk free rate of call it 10%, otherwise why go through the trouble. If this sounds familiar, this is essentially impermanent loss, the very issue passive LPs face for on chain liquidity providing, and the very reason you pay them fees to passively be quote against as price moves against them. Most LPs do not get paid enough though, and the majority are actually losing money relative to impermanent loss. This is actually enormously bullish for on chain options, but that's another post. 95% of the time when you buy any option in any situation, whether on Derive, Deribit, or Robinhood, you are in negative PNL at first. Some people might point out that if you're always executing at a small loss, aren't options -ve? Options pricing may be -ve at that exact moment in time on the trade, but trading them can still be extremely +ve in the context of your portfolio construction and what it allows you to do. You can't replicate the convexity, flexibility or path independence that options give you via perps, and I'm willing to pay a little extra for those features. A good analogy is that when you sit down at a poker table in a casino, they charge what's called "rake", call it $5 per hand. Assuming a normal distribution of cards and equally skilled players, playing poker in the casino is -ve because of this rake. But in reality, it can be extremely profitable to play poker in a casino if you think you have edge over the other players, and the casino is just charging you for access to these braindead idiots, certainty that you'll get paid and generally not shot, one free water bottle per sometimes etc. I'm not an options market maker and I promise you nobody has paid more of this theoretical "rake" to these hoe ass mm's than I have. I would not be surprised if I've paid over $1m in spreads YTD. But I've also made 8 figure PNL by trading against these hoe ass mm. For some of you as well, no offense, but it's kinda a skill issue. If you slam some 0DTE options and then want to sell out of them an hour later rather than hedge via perps, you're probably just doing it wrong. Spreads should factor much more into your trade decision making process in crypto options than in TradFi options, which are orders of magnitude more liquid. This isn't to say that spreads can't or shouldn't improve, and it's actually part of my bull case for @DeriveXYZ. The dream scenario for a hoe ass mm is what's called "two way flow". This means they have a buyer for these calls and a seller, and they can instantly pair them up, not need to pay for hedging, and just capture that bid ask spread. But if I'm not a pussy ass mm and I actually just want those naked calls, and there's a 🏳️‍🌈🐻 somewhere out there who also just wants to sell those calls, we can meet in the middle at mark and both be happy that we're executing at the theoretical fair value, while cutting out the hoe ass mm. This will make RFQ pricing much closer to order book pricing, and we'll eventually have tons of people willing to take both sides of the bet peer to peer. Hoe ass mm's aren't evil, and if they are, they are a necessary evil for now. What @DeriveXYZ is building will eventually allow for thousands of market participants to participate in better price discovery and give lower spreads than Deribit ever could. That said, bad spreads are bad for business for everyone. If options aren't being traded because hoe ass mm's are getting greedy, it's bad for the trader, the exchange, and the greedy hoe ass mm. People are right to point out that big spreads are bad, but you also need to contextualize them. Are they bad relative to the rest of the industry? Very likely not. Derive very frequently has some of the best pricing available (trust me, I check). Might they be too bad to take that trade though? Sure, all the time. It's a quirk of options, especially on alts, that sometimes you'll see a great trade in theory, and when you go ask for a quote, the hoe ass mm is charging bad spreads because they also think it's a good trade and don't want to sell it to you. Same concept as why plumbers get to charge you $10k to fix your overflowing toliet at 2am; they'll give you a price, it just won't be a good one. TLDR: Thank you for coming to my TED talk, hoe ass mm's charging wide spreads is bad but part of the game, the only way to improve is by building exactly what @DeriveXYZ is building, options volume overall should dramatically increase as spreads tighten, and spreads will tighten as volume/demand increases.