Talk about options on the S&P 500 index, and you are discussing a beast of a market that trades trillions of dollars in notional volume every day. Crypto traders now appear to want to access it over a blockchain.

Hypercall illustrates the demand. The options platform built on Hyperliquid, the eighth-largest blockchain by total value locked (TVL), went live in June, and more than 80% of the $640 million in notional volume since then has come from S&P 500 options, the exchange told CoinDesk. Open interest, the value of contracts still outstanding, is about $49 million, of which $47 million is in S&P 500 options.

While the numbers are small next to traditional markets and Deribit's crypto options business, which started shortly after the platform’s 2016 debut and now routinely sees billions of dollars in daily volume and open interest, they illustrate a growing trend: the desire to access financial instruments when conventional markets are closed. Hypercall lists daily, weekly and monthly expiries, including over weekends.

"The volume is concentrated in options expiring the following day," Jake Sylvestre, founder of Hypercall, said in an email interview. "Traders can take a view on the next day's move or hold a position further out."

Traders are gravitating to blockchains for exposure to traditional markets, including derivatives. Hyperliquid’s decentralized exchange (DEX), also known as Hyperliquid, has become a go-to venue for placing trades and managing risk through perpetual futures, especially on weekends when conventional markets are closed and geopolitical tensions have repeatedly escalated.

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