Bybit Is Putting Options on Top of Stock Perpetuals, Starting With a Company That Is Not Listed

Bybit is adding options on its stock perpetual futures, beginning with contracts referencing SpaceX and Nvidia, The Block reported. Trading opens on 17 September, runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and settles in the dollar stablecoin USDT, with fractional lot sizes so a position does not require the notional value of a full share.

A perpetual future is a derivative with no expiry date, held in line with the underlying price by periodic funding payments between longs and shorts. A stock perpetual applies that structure to an equity reference price rather than a crypto one. Bybit's new products are options written on those perpetuals: a second derivative layer, giving the holder the right rather than the obligation to take a position at a set level.

The SpaceX part is the interesting part

Nvidia is a listed company with a continuous public market and an options chain of its own. SpaceX is not listed. There is no exchange-traded reference price, no public order book and no regulated options market to arbitrage against. Whatever the SPCX contract settles against, it is not a price discovered by a stock exchange.

That distinction changes what the product is. For Nvidia, a 24/7 contract is largely a wrapper around an existing market, useful mainly for the hours and days when the equity market is shut. For SpaceX, the derivative is not tracking a market, it is standing in for one.

Why round-the-clock matters, and why it costs

The commercial case for equity derivatives on a crypto venue has always been the calendar. Cash equities trade for roughly six and a half hours on weekdays. Crypto venues never close. Weekend and overnight risk, which equity holders can only sit through, becomes tradeable.

The cost is that the hedging market is closed when the derivative is open. A market maker quoting options on a stock perpetual at three in the morning on a Sunday cannot lay off delta in the underlying share. It prices that inability into the spread, and it manages inventory against a reference that is itself a derivative. Fractional lots widen the user base but do not change that arithmetic.

What to watch

The measure of this product is not the launch, it is what the order book looks like in the hours when nothing else trades. Options markets need continuous two-sided quoting to be usable, and quoting an unlisted name without a cash market to hedge into is a harder business than quoting Nvidia.

Volume in SPCX relative to NVDA after the first few weeks will say more than any announcement. If the private-company contract draws real interest, expect other venues to write derivatives on names with no public market, which is a materially different proposition from tokenizing a listed share.