John Jansen

John Jansen possesses an incredibly intense, specialized background in traditional financial derivatives and market making. Beginning in 1999, his formative professional background was forged entirely on the trading floor of the Amsterdam Stock Exchange as an options trader. This elite, high-pressure background in complex financial instruments gave him the exact technical blueprint required to build Deribit's institutional-grade matching engine.

John Jansen is a highly successful Dutch entrepreneur and the original co-founder and long-time CEO of Deribit, a massive, industry-leading cryptocurrency derivatives exchange. Discovering Bitcoin in 2012, Jansen quickly realized that the nascent cryptocurrency market completely lacked professional-grade options and futures trading platforms. In 2016, he officially launched Deribit alongside his brother Marius to fill this massive institutional void. Under his strategic leadership, Deribit completely dominated the global crypto options market, handling billions in daily trading volume and surviving massive industry crashes. His tenure culminated in a historic 2025 exit when the publicly traded exchange Coinbase acquired Deribit for nearly $3 billion.