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Compare market positioning with top industry peers
Explore Deribit
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Company History
Founded 2016 in Dubai, United Arab Emirates
In 2012, John Jansen, a veteran Dutch derivatives trader who had spent years in the high-stress trading pits of the Amsterdam European Options Exchange (now Euronext Amsterdam) trading index and equity options, discovered Bitcoin. Jansen immediately recognized that Bitcoin's unprecedented volatility made it the ultimate asset for options trading: traditional equities moved 1% or 2% a week, while Bitcoin routinely swung 20% in an afternoon. However, when Jansen looked for a platform to trade crypto options, none existed. The few platforms offering Bitcoin futures were primitive and lacked the complex risk management engines required for options Greeks (Delta, Gamma, Vega, Theta). In 2014, John teamed up with his brother Marius Jansen, an experienced international business executive, and Luuk Stappers, an elite computer science graduate and distributed systems engineer. Bootstrapping the company with €500,000 of personal savings and angel capital from fellow Dutch options pit veterans, they spent two years in an Amsterdam office building Deribit (a portmanteau of 'Derivatives' and 'Bitcoin'). In 2016, Deribit officially launched. Initially handling only a few dozen Bitcoin contracts a day, Deribit's reputation exploded in 2017 as global quantitative hedge funds discovered its sub-millisecond matching engine and Black-76 pricing models. By 2019, Deribit had swallowed virtually the entire global crypto options market, rendering competitors completely irrelevant through the sheer power of liquidity density.
Since its establishment in 2016, Deribit expanded from an early-stage venture into a recognized leader in Cryptocurrency Options, Institutional Derivatives Exchange, Volatility Products & Market Infrastructure, overcoming key market challenges.
Over its history, Deribit executed decisive strategic pivots toward scalable monetization and digital distribution, securing its current market leadership.
By continually modernizing operations and embracing workflow automation, Deribit maintains resilience through changing technological and economic cycles.