The contracts go live on 17 September with USDT settlement, fractional lots and no 100-share minimum. SpaceX was already the most-traded equity perpetual in June at more than $66 billion of volume.
Bybit will list options on perpetual futures tracking SpaceX and Nvidia from 17 September, the first options contracts written on stock perpetuals.
Trading opens at 8pm UTC. The contracts settle in USDT, trade in fractional lots, sit inside Bybit's Unified Trading Account with portfolio margin, and support the standard structures: outright buying and selling, spreads, straddles, covered calls. The underlying perpetuals never expire. The options do, and the exchange says it will keep adding expiries as it goes. Tesla, the Invesco QQQ ETF, SOXL and Micron are queued behind the first two.
The pitch is about access. A US listed equity option covers 100 shares and trades only while American options exchanges are open, which rules out most of the world for most of the day. Bybit's version has neither constraint. Someone in Lagos or Jakarta holding USDT can write a covered call on Nvidia at three in the morning local time, in whatever size they can afford.
The 100-share lot is not a trivial detail. Under standard terms a single contract on a high-priced stock ties up considerably more premium than most retail accounts will commit to one position, which pushes smaller traders towards buying one cheap contract at a time rather than running actual structures. Fractional lots change that arithmetic. They also make it easier to lose money in ways a first-time options buyer will not see coming, since the instrument that has become affordable is the same one that decays to zero on a schedule.
Then there is SpaceX. It is a private company. No exchange lists its stock, no consolidated tape prints a price for it, and no borrow market exists to hedge an option against. What Bybit is listing is an option on a perpetual on a reference price for equity that almost nobody trading it could buy in a primary market. Each layer has a coherent rationale. Stacked, they produce a contract whose settlement value nobody outside the venue can check against a public quote, because there isn't one.
The demand is not hypothetical. Tokenised-equity perpetual volume rose from $85 billion in January to roughly $470 billion in June, and SpaceX was the single most-traded name in that month at more than $66 billion. A company whose shares are unavailable to the public outtraded every listed stock on those venues. Perpetuals never expire and need no broker relationship, and they settle in a stablecoin much of the world already holds; for a trader outside the United States that strips out most of the friction between them and exposure to American technology stocks.
Bybit is not first to equities, only to options written on them. Coinbase listed perpetual futures on the Magnificent Seven in March, Kraken had round-the-clock perps on stocks, gold and major indexes a month before that, and Robinhood has been pushing 24/7 tokenised stocks alongside its own chain, where leveraged perp accounts now exist as ERC-20 tokens. Ondo let users post tokenised stocks as collateral against perps in July. Regulated venues have been moving in the same direction from the other end: Coinbase's first onchain stock under Abu Dhabi's new rules was Apple.
Onchain the shift has been faster still. Equity-focused HIP-3 markets grew from roughly 2 per cent of Hyperliquid's perpetual volume at the start of the year to around half of it, with Nvidia, Tesla and Nasdaq-100 contracts doing most of the work. That book cleared $4 billion earlier this month. An order book built for crypto perpetuals has become, in eight months, a substantial venue for trading American technology stocks.
None of it is regulated as equity derivatives. Bybit is not a US-regulated exchange, and perpetuals sit awkwardly against the security futures regime that governs single-stock contracts in the United States. The products still track US securities and settle against US price action. That mismatch is roughly what Hyperliquid's policy arm asked the SEC and CFTC to address last week, when it argued that perpetuals should be classified by their economic structure rather than by what they reference. Adding options on top widens the gap rather than narrowing it: an option inherits every ambiguity in its underlying and then adds convexity to it.
Bybit describes the launch as an industry first, and on the narrow question of options written on stock perpetuals that claim looks right. Whether it is a good idea is a different question, and the honest answer is that nobody knows how these books behave under stress. Options market makers hedge by trading the underlying. Here the underlying is itself a synthetic instrument on a venue that also lists the option, which concentrates a lot of risk in one place during exactly the conditions when concentration matters.
No exchange lists a SpaceX share. Perpetuals on one traded $66 billion in June regardless.
