Hendrik Ghys

Founder @ThalexGlobal

[Romano @RNR_0]

$1000 startup capital @ThalexGlobal: https://t.co/gt3n3Sv13Y

80% profit share. Withdrawable daily after the first week. If you're profitable, profit boost 1:1

Also Thalex tweets out good insights so you won't be shooting blind

[Hendrik Ghys @minus1_12]

It's mostly correlation between underlying price and vol.

The call-put skew prices in staircase up, elevator down.

A break below 60k would have triggered significant realized volatility but now that that scenario seems less likely, IVs are compressing and settling in for a lower baseline into summer.

[Hendrik Ghys @minus1_12]

@thurty33z @RNR_0 Sorry for that. Could you perhaps dm me with your prospect id? Then I'll sort it out.

[Hendrik Ghys @minus1_12]

@sunnyquant_hk As in probability of getting to the strike?

By approximation that's 2 x N(d2), where N(d2) is the implied probability of expiring above/below the strike for a call/put.

[Hendrik Ghys @minus1_12]

This is what I personally use as a mental model for options. It's a bit unorthodox.

At the end of the day, the (long) option's value-add is to give you downside protection while giving you continued upside if price initially goes against you before turning in your favour.

So this stop buy/sell framework translates the options trade into (a) how likely is it that the strike will be reached and (b) how many times would it be crossed.

[Thalex @ThalexGlobal]

Here's a way to think about options.

Which might make them less intimidating.

Think of an option as a prepaid stop-buy/stop-sell algo.

The goal of the algo is to create a hockey stick payoff:
Capped downside, uncapped upside.

It resembles a perp with a stop-loss, except the stop can recharge. Instead of being kicked out after one hit, the option keeps reloading stop orders until expiry.

Around the strike K, a call alternates between buy/sell:
• If price crosses K from below, it buys you in
• If price crosses K from above, it stops you out

It ensures that above the strike you're long, and below the strike you're flat.

Basically, an option is an all-you-can-eat stop order.

The more price chops around K, the more value-for-money you got for paying the premium.

You could replicate an option by automating a stop-buy stop-sell order rule in the perpetual. But you'll incur trading costs with every crossing. The option saves you the trouble. The premium is the preset cost of running that stop/start engine.

Each option's price reflects an expected number of strike crossings. OTM options are cheaper than ATM because price first needs to reach the strike.

[Hendrik Ghys @minus1_12]

Thanks for checking in :)

We (finally) see people experiment with options selling strategies using the funded accounts.

Now we see quite a few people do actually succeed in running up an account from $100-200 to 3-5k.

Initially, most people just bought short-dated options and quickly lost their balance.

But you're right, our problem is scaling this up across enough customers.

The big upside for any options exchange remains to convert perps traders into trying options, but it takes a ton of effort on the education side. Also, getting people through KYC remains a huge hurdle.

[Thalex @ThalexGlobal]

Great episode with @Sokio8D and @Sellingvol.

Appreciate the s/o.

Full disclosure, we bribed @Sellingvol with a funded account (which he 3x'd in two days by the way).

Recommend you listen to the whole thing.

Below are the intern notes for future reference:

---

The core tension in crypto options is that retail wants simple red/green directional gambling (perps, binary options, zero-DTE) while institutions want structured products (principal protected notes, barrier options) — and the market is not mature enough to serve either group well. "Retail likes clicking red or green up down. They don't care about Greeks." A retail user can deposit $1,000 on Hyperliquid, use 10x leverage, and trade with a spread of one cent. Options have a $500 spread, and even if you are directionally right, a vol crush can turn a win into a loss. On the institutional side, TradFi wants complex multi-leg payoff structures they can block trade in size. Crypto earn products masquerade as no-fee products but the exchange takes 60-70% of the premium. The gap between these two poles is why options volume is still 1% of perp volume.

The "vol is meant to be sold" thesis is correct in the long run — as the market matures, more players sell structures and dampen vol — but the Turkey Chart shows that 2 months of losses can wipe out 22 months of gains, and when vol compresses into the 30s, a spike to 80-100 vol inevitably follows and destroys the complacent. Back-test selling 10-delta calls for two years yields 22 profitable months and 2 losing months, and those 2 months erase everything. The 1010 event is the textbook example. Vol was compressed. Then Bitcoin dropped ~$14k in a day. Over 200 people blew up on Deribit alone. "APIs went down, Binance API went down, Deribit — we have a collocated server and we couldn't reach it. If you can't delta hedge and the APIs are down, you implode." Anecdotal chatter said one of the biggest players on a major exchange lost hundreds of millions or billions in that single day.

DeFi options failed initially because requiring 100% collateralization to sell premium was capital-inefficient to the point of absurdity — the fix is a hybrid onchain/offchain model with portfolio margin, which is finally arriving in 2026. "When Bitcoin's $100,000 and I want to sell one contract and make $200 in premium, I have to post $100k to make $200. It makes no sense." The new generation (Derive, Cayenne, and others) runs the risk engine offchain because it is not possible to run portfolio margin calculations onchain, then settles onchain. Portfolio margin lets multi-leg strategies offset each other and actually gives more leverage than perps if used correctly. Deribit has had this for years, but DeFi options are just now catching up.

Deribit controls 70-80% of crypto options volume, and 70-80% of that volume is institutional — leaving a wide-open niche for small market-making teams to operate on smaller exchanges and protocols where the spread is fat and the big shops do not bother to compete. Marty's team is four people. "We swim in this niche pool of capital where maybe the big shops it's not worth their time to do it. We'll market make a smaller exchange or a smaller protocol or get these crazy DeFi incentives. If we make $100k in a month, that's insane to us, but to the big shop, that's not enough." Deribit's SMA (separately managed account) program only has about 10 firms on it. The options space overall is "still so new that you still have opportunity for the space to grow."

Bitcoin is in a narrative crisis — it was supposed to be digital gold but gold rallied while BTC stayed flat, it was supposed to be tech beta but tech rallied while BTC stayed flat, and the strategic reserve narrative was priced in as a buying program when in reality it was just consolidating existing government holdings under the Treasury. "Bitcoin is a chameleon. Risk asset, digital gold, inflation hedge. Every narrative, we change. Then the narrative runs out." BTC has been in the same ~$70-100k range for two years. "We priced in a strategic reserve that never meant buying with taxpayer money — it meant they would take crypto scattered across agencies and put it under the Treasury. That's it." Saylor is the marginal buyer and "everyone laughs at him when it's down, but if he's right and Bitcoin goes to 200k, nobody will be laughing."

ETH has been flat at ~$2,100 for 5 years — Marty shared an anecdote of an ETH maxi friend in Rio who is a VP of engineering at a major crypto company, only holds ETH, and is flat or under on every buy captures the grim reality that all the institutional building on Ethereum has not translated to price appreciation. "If everybody is building on ETH and wants to build on ETH, then why isn't the price up? Because we don't need the price to go up for people to build on ETH. We actually need it less — gas needs to be near zero, which means ETH is worth less." He contrasts with a simple alternative: Brazil's Selic rate has been 15%, and the BRL depreciated 20% against the USD in the last year, meaning holding dollar-based assets returned 20% from currency alone plus 15% from rates. "That was one of the greatest trades I've ever taken in a forex kind of situation."

On Hyperliquid, Marty went from critic to believer — 11 people making a billion dollars with a cult following and a working product — but the regulatory risk is existential when the US administration changes in 2028. "I was a big critic. The features were kind of bad. They did maintenance during FOMC and CPI. But now the product works. They have $2B Bitcoin open interest vs OKX at $3B. They are not a small player anymore." The risk is enforcement — "when you get too big, you are a target. We saw it with BitMEX, with Luna." What if the US says "we're done"? Hyperliquid is the target now. "I feel like we have until Trump isn't president anymore. If we get a Democrat in 2028, it might all be over."

The simplest way for a retail trader to express a directional view in options is a call spread, not an outright call — because the spread caps theta decay and creates a defined-risk payoff that actually works if the trader is right, whereas an outright long call into an event is "thanks for the donation to the Marty fund." "If you buy the 77 call and sell the 78 call, and it's above 78, you make money. Max profit is $1,000. It probably costs $400-500. You doubled your money. If you bought the outright 77 call, now you have theta decay and you were right directionally but still lost because vol crushed." The caveat: this is not a scalable strategy, and the vol selling dynamic means there will always be losing months that wipe out the winners. "It's not as easy as people want to make it out to be."

[Hendrik Ghys @minus1_12]

@RNR_0 Very cool.

I like how you arranged the tickers in your top bar btw. I guess the idea is that when you scan left to right you get the good news first.

[Thalex @ThalexGlobal]

On thalex, you can:
1. Get a funded account
2. Sell straddles each week
3. Δ-hedge with bots via the UI

It's a pretty powerful yield engine.

[Hendrik Ghys @minus1_12]

@confinedape @Sokio8D @CampsorCapital - We were talking about this in milan the other day, any desks that you recommend?

I would presume FalconX, Wintermute, STS and Kraken OTC but I can't speak from personal xp.

[Ole Peters @ole_b_peters]

I think most of finance is a waste of valuable time on earth.
But sometimes it's pretty, so it has its uses, I suppose.

[Hendrik Ghys @minus1_12]

@ole_b_peters how did you generate this if I may ask?

[Hendrik Ghys @minus1_12]

@eth_milano Highly recommend checking out @eth_milano next year.

Amazing venue, very well organised, nice vibe and a surprisingly high number of great conversations with people interested in trading.

[Hendrik Ghys @minus1_12]

In case anyone might be interested, in the post below you find the slides for a talk I gave in @eth_milano called:

"The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Selling Volatility".

[Hendrik Ghys @minus1_12]

@Gravity5ucks @ThalexGlobal @eth_milano @ryskfinance I can already share the slides with you.

https://t.co/ebZnYADXbD

[Hendrik Ghys @minus1_12]

It's kind of true though right?

You can't be so clever that you can sell vol and not get drawdowns.

Which means that you should favour simple strategies that are highly testable. Then you can trust your edge and understand the data, if and when you have a down day, instead of adding tons of complexity to try them.

[Hendrik Ghys @minus1_12]

@Gravity5ucks @ThalexGlobal @eth_milano @ryskfinance I can already share the slides with you.

https://t.co/ebZnYADXbD

[Hendrik Ghys @minus1_12]

@ThalexGlobal Just added support to toggle BTC/ETH as well

[Hendrik Ghys @minus1_12]

A vanilla option is an infinite sum of binaries.

A binary call pays $1 if price expires above K.
A vanilla call pays $1 for every $1 above K.

The binary prices the probability of expiring ITM.
The vanilla prices the expectation of how far ITM.

The main price inputs are the same: S/K, vol, and time.
The key difference is in the relationship to volatility.

A binary flips short vol ITM.
It has max payoff if price were to stop moving.

A vanilla stays long vol ITM.
It always wants price to continue progressing.

[Thalex @ThalexGlobal]

Our second screen apps, all in one place:
https://t.co/AZY0Qw8Kbd