Crypto glossary
Options chain
An options chain is the table listing every available strike and expiry for an asset, with bid and ask prices, implied volatility, Greeks and open interest.
Options platforms organize their contracts in a chain. For each expiry date, strikes run down the middle of the screen, with calls on one side and puts on the other. Each row shows bid and ask prices, often both in the coin and in dollars, implied volatility, delta and other Greeks, volume and open interest. Rows are shaded to separate in-the-money from out-of-the-money contracts.
Reading the chain is the first step in any options trade: it shows which strikes are liquid, how expensive protection is, where open interest clusters ahead of expiry and how implied volatility changes across strikes and dates. Deribit's chain for bitcoin and ether is the reference in crypto, and on-chain options protocols display similar tables.
Far-dated and far out-of-the-money strikes can have wide spreads and little open interest, so the displayed price may not be achievable for size. Quotes in the coin can confuse newcomers, because the dollar cost of a 0.01 BTC premium changes as bitcoin moves even if the option itself does not.
Example
Opening the bitcoin options chain for the end-of-month expiry, a trader sees that the 110,000 dollar call has the most open interest and an implied volatility of 52 percent, against 48 percent at the money.