Citizen DeFi Play: Onchain Zero-Day Options
All it takes is one day and one bold decision to make life-changing wealth in crypto. While crypto’s casinos have never been for the faint-hearted, degens who come prepared to risk it all can make fortunes in the blink of an eye with zero days to expiration (0DTE) options!
Whether you’re chasing 1,000x leverage without the risk of price-based liquidation or looking to harvest daily income from your cryptocurrency bags, 0DTE options can make for a powerful addition to your trading tool belt – if you can stomach the risk!
Welcome to the world of 0DTE crypto options, where literally every second counts, and the only thing that stands between you cashing out and crashing out is one swift market move. 🚀
🧐 Why 0DTE Options?
Like any high-stakes casino, crypto markets provide participants with a number of different games to test their luck and skills.
Although most crypto newbies start out satisfied with the outsized rips and dips experienced by prominent spot tokens – like BTC, ETH, or SOL – many quickly come to realize they’ll need more firepower if they want to break out of the Matrix.
Some speculators soon pivot to longer-tail tokens offering higher return prospects, like memecoins and new token launches. Unfortunately, as insiders control large swaths of token supplies and can manipulate markets on a whim, turning a profit in this arena can feel like playing against a stacked deck where the house has overwhelming odds to win.
Portnoy is committing incredible levels of crime.
— No Face (@0xKaonashi) February 10, 2025
>Someone sends him 50% of the supply of Fartstool
>He buys 10 SOL to lure in copy traders
>Nukes for 6 figures
Truly egalitarian pic.twitter.com/1YGqLZ6ETW
Alternatively, perpetual futures (or perps) are widely accessible instruments that allow crypto traders to dial up the return profile of their tokens with leverage.
Shrewd traders can make massive returns by correctly predicting the price movements of a token with highly leveraged perpetual positions, but the drastic price swings experienced by crypto assets often subject even directionally correct positions to liquidation, taking traders out of the market and forcing them to chase the move.
With options, crypto speculators forgo all risks of price-based liquidation by making a one-time payment that gives them the right to buy or sell a token for a fixed price at a future date.
Crypto tokens can have hundreds of listed options at various execution prices across multiple maturity dates, but zero days to expiration options, or options that expire on the same day they are purchased, will always offer traders the biggest bang for their buck.
For example, at the time of this analysis, BTC was trading at $97.5K, and it cost $12K to purchase one $95k BTC put (the right to sell one BTC at $95K) until September 26, 2025. Purchasing these rights until the end of February cost just $2.5K, meanwhile, securing the right to sell at $95K for the remainder of the day cost a meager $60.
While entering into shorter-dated option plays leaves much less time to profit, you must pay extra for the luxury of time. In the example provided above, a sudden (but not entirely unreasonable) 3% or more move down in the price of BTC could allow the 0DTE options trader to experience profits 200x greater than that of a longer-dated September position!
Assuming the “efficient market” has correctly priced an option, it is expected to expire unprofitable for the buyer. Considering this, many long-term crypto investors rightfully question how buying such instruments fits into a sustainable investment strategy.
Thankfully, even risk-averse investors can capitalize on 0DTE option dynamics to generate daily income, all while capping their potential losses with a near-dated expiration date.
Spot crypto holders can effortlessly earn premium payments, particularly in times of market chop, by agreeing to sell their tokens at a set price to 0DTE call option speculators looking to make high-stakes bets on short-term moves.
While "traders" are fuming on sideways $BTC price action, I am silently cashing in on 0DTE covered calls, day by day, every day. 10-minute of my daily time. We are not the same. pic.twitter.com/Z6mnjXN3Qc
— Chartpunk (@The_Chartpunk) June 21, 2024
📊 Your Options for Options
Crypto’s largest centralized exchanges have offered options trading to retail clientele for years, and American stock exchanges are now inundated with options on a number of crypto exchange-traded funds, from spot BTC ETFs like BlackRock’s IBIT to leveraged futures-linked products like Volatility Shares’ ETHU.
While centralized marketplaces require their users to provide personally identifiable information and may prohibit access to individuals from certain nations, crypto-native permissionless options platforms are available in their stead!
Start your onchain 0DTE crypto options journey with these two platforms. 👇
🦁 Derive
Formerly known as Lyra Finance, Derive’s impeccable three-year track record has established it as one of the foremost permissionless crypto options protocols!
Anyone seeking to interact with Derive must first bridge ERC20s from Ethereum, Optimism, Arbitrum, or Base Base to the Derive Chain, a semi-permissioned OP Stack rollup implementation that houses the protocol’s underlying derivatives markets and associated smart contracts.
Once onboarded into the Derive L2, users can borrow against non-USDC tokens for portfolio margin, trade risky perpetuals and options products, or deposit assets into automated yield-generating vault strategies that generate income by selling options.
Derive offers options markets for BTC and ETH.
EF would have made ~$15m over the last 8 months and had to sell 0 ETH if they had been selling covered calls against these holdings. https://t.co/YFgw84Nikw pic.twitter.com/o4NTrU3dOz
— Muir (@muir_eth) February 9, 2025
🎀 Aevo
Aevo is a decentralized derivatives exchange from the Ribbon Finance team that specializes in options and perps trading.
Built on a bespoke optimistic-style rollup, the exchange combines an offchain order book system with onchain settlements, allowing for the efficient matching of orders while ensuring that trades are executed and settled securely through smart contracts.
The idea? Offer traders the best of both worlds: the speed and flexibility of offchain operations, coupled with the transparency and security of onchain execution. Aevo currently offers options for BTC and ETH.
Introducing: weETH Collateral
— Aevo (@aevoxyz) January 6, 2025
weETH is now accepted as collateral on Aevo!
You can now trade on Aevo while earning yield on your collateral. pic.twitter.com/AawKUee1Aw
Disclaimers
Options trading is inherently risky, and while it could be your path to quick crypto gains, it can just as easily implode your account. Learn more about crypto options trading and explore unique offerings and strategies beyond 0DTE by following the link below!
