Bitcoin options overtake futures as offshore dated volume sits 97% below 2021

Bitcoin options now hold the larger position inventory for the first time on the venue set Glassnode tracks, while dated offshore Bitcoin futures volume sits about 97% below its 2021 peak.

In January 2026, Bitcoin options open interest reached about $74.1 billion against roughly $65.22 billion in futures, the first time options carried the larger position inventory, per Glassnode data cited in a Sept. 20 CryptoSlate analysis. Dated futures volume across the offshore venues Glassnode tracks is now about 97% below its 2021 level.

Options have expanded from roughly one-quarter to nearly half of crypto-native Bitcoin derivatives open interest, gaining share in four of the five market regimes Glassnode studied since 2019. By March 2025, Bitcoin's options-to-futures open interest ratio had climbed from 57.8% to 69.6% in less than a week, while Ether's stayed lower.

Perpetuals carry what dated contracts used to

A Sept. 18 Binance snapshot at around 03:25 ET showed about 108,289 BTC of open interest in the BTCUSDT perpetual and another 19,465 BTC in the BTCUSDC perpetual. At the mark prices, those two contracts represented roughly $9.93 billion of outstanding positions.

Binance's two USD-margined dated Bitcoin contracts, expiring Sept. 25 and Dec. 25, carried only about $77 million combined, putting open interest in the two major stablecoin-margined perpetuals at roughly 129 times the amount in the corresponding quarterly contracts.

Where the activity has moved

Glassnode describes the derivatives market as moving away from coin-backed leverage toward stable-value collateral, which lets professional desks manage positions without the margin itself falling alongside Bitcoin. Bybit's share of tracked Bitcoin options volume reached 28%, up from below 10%, with its options book expanding from $529 million in its first month to $2.33 billion. Ethereum accounted for roughly one-third of Bybit's options turnover over the prior 90 days. The Bybit-specific figures come from research produced with Bybit and should be read with that relationship in mind.

CME sits outside the offshore frame

CryptoSlate's futures study looks at offshore exchanges and explicitly excludes CME, which serves a different institutional purpose. Spot ETFs have made CME's institutional futures market more relevant by enabling funds to hold spot exposure and short futures against it: basis traders can buy Bitcoin or an ETF and sell a future when the spread is wide enough to cover financing and execution. CME's current futures volumes are not quantified in the source beyond that institutional point.

Limits of this dataset

The 97% figure is attributed to Glassnode without a primary report URL in the source, so the underlying dataset could not be independently opened. The article does not quantify perp DEX growth, such as Hyperliquid's share gains, or compare it against the offshore dated-futures collapse. Beyond the Binance example, the specific offshore venues that lost share are not named.