With BTC again edging toward alltime highs, a large volume of money is flowing into the Bitcoin derivatives markets. According to crypto market data aggregator Glassnode, outstanding futures contracts pushed into new alltime highs on March 11, with open interest across exchanges approaching 20 billion. Options have also surged to see record volumes in 2021, with Derebit now regularly hosting more than 1 billion worth of daily trade. According to Binanceowned CoinMarketCap, the threelargest centralized derivatives exchanges Binance, Huobi Global, and ByBit represent more than 100 billion in combined daily trade. Binance alone is 57 billion. The next ten highestranked exchanges facilitated more than 65 billion in trade over the past 24 hours.

However, despite the surging volumes, some decentralized derivatives exchanges appear to be struggling to attract the momentum of their centralized counterparts. Skyrocketing Ethereum fees appear to have slowed the growth of decentralized options, with the complicated smart contract executions required to interact with some Ethereumbased protocols resulting in gas prices of more than 1,000.

Similarly record fees also appear to have deterred traders from Ethereumpowered decentralized futures, with daily volume on dYdX plummeting from tens of billions in January to roughly 100 million over the past week. Recent liquidity issues on the popular onchain options trading protocol Hegic are also impacting Etherums decentralized option…