Derive has collected $362.5 million in options premiums this year, equal to 87.4% of all on-chain options premiums, according to Alea Research. That total is up 191.9% from the platform’s $124.2 million for full-year 2025. DRV closed at a record $0.2877 on Sept. 17, then reached $0.3857 by Saturday, giving it a circulating market capitalization of $385 million and a fully diluted valuation of $577 million. The token rose 158% over the week.
Perpetuals are no longer a side business on the platform. Derive generated $4.51 million in fees this year, with $1.76 million, or 39.1%, coming from perpetual futures. In February, perpetuals brought in more fees than options. Of the $4.51 million in platform fees, Derive retained $3.37 million and directed 35% of that toward DRV buybacks. The platform has burned 16.6 million DRV this year, while issuing 6.1 million tokens in staking rewards.
Near-total control of the on-chain options market
Total on-chain options premiums stand at $414.9 million this year, and Derive accounts for $362.5 million of that amount. In 2025, the platform generated $124.2 million for the whole year. The report says Derive’s share of on-chain options premiums has remained above 80% since spring.
The gap with Deribit is still wide when measured against the broader options market. Derive handled daily options activity covering $162.6 million in underlying exposure, while all venues with public data combined traded $7.74 billion. Deribit alone processed $3.56 billion in daily options volume, close to 22 times Derive’s level.
Open interest tells the same story. Derive holds $1.59 billion of positions in a $50.22 billion market, for a 3.2% share. Deribit alone accounts for 78.8%.
Nine months have already delivered almost three times last year’s result
The report treats premiums as a direct measure of whether a venue is actually being used and how much demand it is attracting. On that basis, Derive’s notional options volume rose from $5.38 billion to $12.46 billion. Buyers were not only taking more exposure, they were paying more for each dollar of exposure.
Premium divided by notional volume gives the price of an option relative to the exposure it controls. In the first nine months of 2026, every month came in above the 2025 median of 2.10%, and even the cheapest month reached 2.23%. Over the same period, 30-day implied volatility fell 7.0%. The report says buyers were paying more per dollar of exposure even as volatility moved lower, pointing to demand for longer-dated contracts and strikes closer to spot.
That, in Alea Research’s reading, suggests Derive is increasingly being used the way traders use Deribit.
Pricing, execution cost and the seller’s side of the trade
Before switching venues, traders want to know the cost of taking the same risk in each market. The report compares at-the-money implied volatility across expiries on Derive and Deribit, then breaks out implied volatility differences across the full set of Sept. 17 quotes by expiry and strike.
Quoted prices are only part of the picture. The other half is what it costs to trade through the spread and get filled immediately. The report therefore also compares immediate execution costs at matching strikes on the two venues, measured in cents per $100 traded.
For options sellers, implied volatility is what buyers pay for volatility, while realized volatility is what actually shows up. The gap between the two shapes the seller’s return environment. The report notes that implied volatility fell 7.0% over the year.
Open interest points to traders keeping positions on the platform
Open interest measures the dollar value of positions that remain open. The report argues that a venue people simply pass through for execution looks different from one where they leave positions in place. Data read from Derive Chain show options open interest persisted on the platform throughout the year.
Expiry and strike distribution matter because they determine where risk sits ahead of the next market move. The report breaks down call and put open interest across selected expiries and strike levels, then shows gamma by strike. In this context, gamma measures how quickly options exposure changes in dollar terms when price moves by 1%.
Block and negotiated trades offer a window into participant mix
Block trades and negotiated trades are presented as a way for institutions to build positions without moving the visible market. Their contribution to fee revenue offers a clue about who is taking the other side. The report includes a chart tracking the share of fees generated by the largest accounts and by negotiated trades.
Perpetual futures produced 39.1% of fees
Derive also runs a perpetual futures book. That business has traded $5.2 billion in notional volume this year and generated 39.1% of the platform’s fees. At the last close in the report, open interest stood at $66.5 million.
Daily volume equals 0.30 times open interest, a ratio the report uses to argue that traders are keeping positions on the platform rather than constantly rotating through it.
Derive has listed 15 perpetual markets. Combined 24-hour volume was $47.49 million and open interest was $66.12 million, with two markets accounting for 82.3% of trading volume.
Funding rates are mostly pinned to the platform’s 10.95% annualized base rate. Alea Research says five markets found their own rates: Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, Hyperliquid and tokenized gold. Seven markets stayed at the base annualized rate more than 90% of the time.
Even the five markets that discovered their own rates had quiet periods. Before May, the highest annualized funding rate reached 128.5%. After that, the peak was 44.6%. The deepest negative reading narrowed from 173.0% to 92.2%. As of Sept. 17, 12 of the 15 listed markets had settled funding at least once, while three had never settled. The report says listed instruments are expanding faster than liquidity is filling in, especially in newer markets.
Vault flows and strategy returns are not the same thing
On Derive, vaults mainly follow one of two strategies. They either sell options and keep the premium, or they buy the asset, short it in the futures market, and earn the spread between the two. The report splits 30-day vault asset changes into new deposits and investment performance, arguing that only one of those factors says anything about whether the strategy itself is working.
It also breaks out annualized basis-vault returns into funding income and cash interest, then shows dollar gains from realized spread capture over the period. What depositors end up with depends on management fees, deposit caps and how much capacity remains in each vault.
The report adds that some of the platform’s volume is bought rather than earned, using DRV incentives paid per $100 of covered trading volume over the last 30 days as the reference point.
Fees, retained revenue, buybacks and supply changes
Traders pay fees; revenue is the share the platform keeps. Derive’s retained revenue this year is $3.37 million. Options generated $2.74 million and perpetuals generated $1.76 million, for a 60.9% versus 39.1% split. In February, perpetuals brought in more than options.
Options fee rates fell from 2.94 cents per $100 traded in January to 1.27 cents in September, a 56.7% decline year to date. Even so, total fees rose because trading volume climbed at the same time.
Rather than distributing fee income directly to token holders, Derive uses its allocation for DRV buybacks. In each of the first nine months, fee-driven buybacks exceeded tokens paid to stakers. Over that stretch, 16.6 million DRV were burned against 6.1 million issued. In total, the DAO has burned 27,645,461 DRV, equal to 35% of fees.
In April, the platform raised that allocation from 25%, cut weekly staking emissions from 250,000 DRV to 100,000 DRV, lowered annualized inflation from 3.8% to 1.5%, and shortened the unstaking period from 28 days to 7 days.
Circulating supply has risen 17.1% this year, while the share of circulating supply that is staked fell from 39.1% to 28.6%.
Revenue multiple has been repriced to 48.7x
The report tracks valuation by dividing market capitalization by annualized revenue from the prior 90 days. In January, the market was paying 22.5x that revenue figure. The multiple has since climbed to 48.7x, up 116.3%, after touching a low of 14.3x.
Alea Research says revenue continued to grow during the same period, so the higher multiple does not reflect a shrinking denominator. It reflects a repricing. At 48.7x, the current price implies that revenue must keep expanding to support the valuation. The report includes scenario work showing implied market capitalization under different revenue assumptions and the price move needed from the latest close in each case.
V3 proposal, compliance hire and Ethereum settlement plan
On Sept. 14, a community member submitted a proposal to deploy Derive V3. Matching and sequencer state transitions would run inside a zero-knowledge virtual machine, with settlement on Ethereum. User funds would be held in Ethereum contracts. Once V2 positions, balances and rewards are migrated into the V3 genesis state, Derive Chain would be phased out. The stated goal is to reach L2Beat Stage 1, where users can exit without operator assistance.
Derive said on Sept. 16 that it had appointed Alex van Voorhees as chief legal and compliance officer. He previously worked at FalconX, where he handled derivatives legal matters and served as interim compliance officer.
The report also says V3 will settle on Ethereum and that the ZEC book currently runs through March 2027. Derive reported that 96% of the 89,100 ETH call options for that month, with strikes at $5,000 and $7,000, were held on Derive.
