Coinbase opens Deribit options, perpetuals to US institutions

Coinbase has finished folding Deribit into its trading stack and opened the combined venue to eligible US institutions. The firm announced the completed integration on October 7 and called the result the Coinbase Global Exchange.

At the Token2049 conference in Singapore, Coinbase said its US-regulated futures commission merchant, Coinbase Financial Markets, can now link American clients to Deribit through the Coinbase Prime platform. The Block and Cointelegraph both reported the details.

What Coinbase turned on

The integration pulls Deribit, the largest crypto options exchange by open interest, onto the same rails as Coinbase's spot, futures and custody services. Onboarding is open now. Options and perpetual futures trading through Coinbase Prime is expected within weeks, not days.

Mechanically, the shift came first. Perpetual futures that had traded on Coinbase International Exchange moved onto Deribit's systems on October 1, and the company says a single account can now reach spot, futures, options, custody, financing and staking.

Perpetual futures let traders bet on price with no expiry date, rolling the position with periodic funding payments, and a sharp move can force a liquidation. Options give the right to buy or sell at a set price by a set date. Both are staples offshore. For most US traders, reaching them has meant foreign entities and separate accounts.

Why the CFTC route matters

Routing the trades through Coinbase Financial Markets is the point of the whole exercise. The unit is registered with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission as a futures commission merchant, the same license that clears regulated US futures. Coinbase said guidance the CFTC issued in May cleared the way for that unit to connect US clients to global derivatives venues. The agency has separately moved to write federal rules for leveraged crypto exchanges.

Derivatives dominate crypto. Coinbase puts them at roughly 80% of global trading volume. For years the deepest of those markets sat offshore, at venues most US desks could not touch without foreign entities. A regulated domestic path changes the plumbing, even when the products look familiar.

Some of this builds on what Coinbase already had. It ran regulated US futures and, separately, an offshore international exchange. What is new is the bridge between them, so a US client clearing through a CFTC-registered merchant can reach the kind of options book that regulated American venues have lacked.

What Deribit brings

Coinbase bought Deribit in a cash-and-stock deal worth about $2.9 billion, roughly $700 million in cash plus 11 million Coinbase shares, and closed the purchase on August 14, 2025. In its release that day, the company called Deribit the number one crypto options exchange by volume and open interest.

The scale is real. Deribit held more than $30 billion in Bitcoin options open interest as of September 30, 2026, according to figures cited by Crypto Briefing and The Block. In July 2025, its best month on record, the venue traded more than $185 billion, by Coinbase's own count. That depth is what Coinbase is now wiring into a US-regulated front door.

Options matter to professional desks for a plain reason. They let a fund hedge a large position or earn income without selling the underlying coin. A deep, regulated US options market has been one of the clearer gaps in the country's crypto build-out.

What is not live yet

Here is the catch. Onboarding has opened, but the trading that makes the venue useful has not started. Coinbase expects options through Coinbase Prime within weeks of the announcement, and eligible non-US retail traders around the same time. US retail access is set for later this year, with no firm date.

Coinbase also plans to revive Coinbase Pro by the end of 2026 for high-volume traders, covering spot, futures, perpetuals, options and equities in one place. Its Advanced platform, meanwhile, picked up a new matching engine, faster onboarding and fee tiers that start at $10,000 in qualifying volume. A spot margin feature will let users borrow against collateral, with up to 10x on selected major assets and up to 5x on others. None of that is switched on today.

So far, Coinbase has not said how many institutions have signed up, nor set a hard date for US retail options. The company framed the launch as a milestone. The products that would prove it still sit behind a rollout schedule.

What to watch

Over the next few weeks, the test is whether onboarding turns into live options and perpetual flow through Coinbase Prime. Watch for a firm date on US retail options, which would widen the audience well beyond institutions. Watch, too, how rivals respond. Kraken, Gemini and others have pushed into US derivatives, and a regulated onshore options market is a prize none of them will give up quietly.