Trading, Perps, Options & Derivatives

Onchain trading is where market structure changes first. Castle Labs covers perp DEXs, options, commodity markets, prediction markets, volatility venues, and exchange design from the microstructure up. Our commodities report benchmarked Hyperliquid's oil perps against CME futures tick by tick; our options and prediction-market work asks the same question for binary outcomes and volatility: where is price discovery moving onchain, and what still blocks institutional depth?

$812.0M

commodity perp volume (24h)

$904.8M

commodity open interest

$2.8B

all Trade XYZ volume (24h)

$418.4M

prediction market TVL

$87.1M

onchain options volume (30d)

$362.6M

Polymarket International TVL

Sources: Hyperliquid Info API (2026-09-15), DeFiLlama prediction markets (2026-09-15), DeFiLlama options volume (2026-09-15).

Flagship Research

March 2026

The Evolution of Commodities

State of Commodities and a Quantitative Analysis of the Growth of these Markets Onchain

July 2026

The Renaissance of Onchain Options

Mapping the expansion of options as a trading instrument and the volatility that prices them

Start Here

Apr 1, 2026

432 Hours of Hyperliquid Oil Market Data: A Microstructure Comparison with CME WTI Futures

Story of three weekends of Price Discovery on Hyperliquid

Feb 6, 2026

Don’t Trade Cryptos, Trade Rates: A Boros Funding Rates Primer

Castle Labs research on Boros, Pendle’s yield-trading platform for funding rates, covering Yield Units, hedging use cases, vaults, liquidity, and power-user strategies.

Jul 6, 2026

The Rebirth of Onchain Options: An Ecosystem View

This article is an excerpt from our research on The Renaissance of Onchain Options, mapping the expansion of options (and prediction markets) as a trading instrument and the volatility that prices them, published in collaboration with Block Scholes.

Questions Covered

Where is onchain price discovery becoming credible?

Castle compares onchain venues with established markets through executed volume, open interest, spreads, liquidity, market hours, and the behaviour of prices during stressed periods.

How are onchain options changing?

The research covers order books, AMMs, perpetual options, short-dated binaries, volatility surfaces, and the overlap between options and prediction markets.

Why do funding-rate markets matter?

Funding-rate products separate the cost of holding perpetual exposure from the asset price itself, giving traders a direct market for rates, basis, and relative-value strategies.