Blockchain.com Launches Bitcoin (BTC) Options Across 7 Assets With One-Week Expiries

Call and Put Contracts on Seven Assets

Blockchain.com switched on options trading for Bitcoin (BTC) and six other digital assets on Tuesday, October 20, adding calls and puts to a derivatives stack it began assembling in April. The initial lineup runs to seven assets, with Ethereum (ETH), Solana (SOL), Hyperliquid (HYPE), Avalanche (AVAX), XRP and Tron (TRX) listed alongside the largest digital asset by market cap. The service runs through the company's Trading Account, and the flow is deliberately thin: a user selects an expected price, an expiry date and an investment amount in the mobile app, and the platform assembles the call or put contract from those three inputs. Initial contracts carry expiries of up to one week, and bought positions must be held to settlement because early close-out is not supported. A call conveys the right to buy the underlying asset at a set price when a rise is expected, while a put conveys the right to sell at a set price, used to brace for a decline or to profit from one. Premiums are paid upfront in USDC, the dollar-pegged stablecoin, and that premium doubles as the maximum possible loss on the trade. The company presents the design as a simplification of a market that normally asks traders to weigh strike prices, expiries and premiums on their own. Taro Wegen, vice president of the consumer business, said in the launch announcement that the work centered on removing that complexity, so an investor needs to decide only the expected direction, the timing and the size of the position. The debut lands six months after the platform introduced perpetual futures in April, extending a build-out that now covers two product families. Directional positioning on the Bitcoin price already moves through venues of every size, from leveraged perps to spot ETF flows, and the company is now bidding for a share of that retail demand, a shift tracked across broader Bitcoin coverage.

CFTC Registration Filed October 13

The options rollout extends a derivatives push that started in April, when the company introduced perpetual futures, contracts without an expiry date that let traders apply leverage to a rising or falling market. That earlier product ran through the company's self-custody DeFi wallet, drawing on infrastructure from the decentralized platform Hyperliquid to route leveraged trading through Bitcoin DeFi markets rather than an in-house order book. The risk profiles of the two products part ways from there. A perpetual position carries leverage with no settlement date, while an options buyer's loss stops at the premium paid upfront. The cap cuts the other way too: if the anticipated price move has not appeared by expiry, the entire premium can be lost. The regulatory track runs in parallel. On October 13 the company said it filed registrations with the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) under two designations. One is futures commission merchant, the status required to carry customer orders in futures; the other is designated contract market, a regulated venue listing for derivatives contracts. Approval would put the platform in front of American customers directly, with futures, options and event contracts, wagers on the outcome of specific events, all in scope. Nothing is live on that front yet. The filings sit at the application stage, and any US service depends on the regulator signing off. The move fits a wider pattern among digital asset trading platforms, which have been hunting for revenue beyond spot trading as fee competition compresses margins. Options, in the company's framing, hand investors a tool for managing price-swing risk instead of absorbing it, and the seven-asset roster points to breadth across major coins rather than depth in a single market. The company has not disclosed early volume figures or user targets for the new options book.

Timing Bets, Not Open-Ended Hedges

The constraints deserve as much weight as the convenience. Expiries capped at one week, no secondary exit and full premium loss on a missed move make these contracts timing bets rather than hedges in the usual sense. For investors who prefer to HODL through volatility, the use case narrows to paying a known cost to brace for a drawdown inside seven days. Current commentary supplies exactly that scenario: market maker Wintermute's $70,000 warning sketches the kind of slide short-dated puts are built around, while Murad's bull cycle call keeps the bullish case in play for short-dated calls. The larger prize sits with the CFTC. If the October 13 filings clear, Blockchain.com gains a regulated US footprint for futures, options and event contracts, and strike selection will lean on the levels our Bitcoin technical analysis tracks. The company's own framing, that options should take three choices in an app instead of a professional's checklist, is the pitch it now has to defend.