Offshore Bitcoin Dated Futures Are Down 97% and Options Took the Rest

Dated Bitcoin futures on offshore exchanges have lost roughly 97% of their volume since 2021. That's not a dip. That's a product getting abandoned.

Options, meanwhile, climbed from about a quarter of crypto-native Bitcoin derivatives open interest to nearly half, gaining share in four of the five market regimes since 2019. In January, options open interest hit about $74.1 billion against $65.22 billion in futures. First time the options book was the bigger one.

One snapshot from Sept. 18 shows how lopsided things got. Around 03:25 ET, Binance's BTCUSDT perpetual carried about 108,289 BTC of open interest, with another 19,465 BTC sitting in the BTCUSDC perpetual, roughly $9.93 billion between them. The exchange's two USD-margined dated contracts, expiring Sept. 25 and Dec. 25, held about $77 million combined. That's around 129 times smaller.

So where did the volume go? It split. Perpetuals took the directional bets, since there's no expiry to roll and no agonizing over which maturity has the deepest book. Options took the hedging, the downside protection, and the trades built around a specific price or date. Dated futures got squeezed in the middle, doing neither job better than the alternative.

The demand side changed too, and that's the part people keep skipping. Spot ETFs, corporate treasuries, and funds now sit on enormous piles of Bitcoin they don't intend to sell. Those holders don't want more or less exposure. They want to reshape the risk around what they already own, which is exactly what a put or a covered call does. And because dealers have to hedge their options books, that flow leaks straight into spot and perpetual liquidity.

Liquidity moved with it. Bybit's share of tracked Bitcoin options volume reached 28%, up from under 10%, and its options book grew from $529 million in month one to $2.33 billion. Ether accounts for roughly a third of Bybit's options turnover over the past 90 days.

One caveat worth stating out loud. Dated futures aren't dead everywhere. The offshore numbers exclude CME, where regulated funds, banks, and basis traders still want standardized contracts and clearing systems they already trust. Read a CFTC fund short position as a basis trade, not a bearish call on Bitcoin.

The story the pitch deck won't tell you is that the product which built crypto's derivatives business got outgrown by the institutions it brought in. Watch options share of open interest. If it keeps climbing through the next drawdown, dated futures won't come back, because nobody misses the instrument they already replaced.