Traditional crypto OTC works over messaging apps. You tell a desk what you want, they come back with a price, you agree, and then you’re both trusting each other and a settlement process to finish the job. It works, it’s how most large trades happen, and it carries counterparty risk that never fully goes away. It also carries an onboarding tax: to get competitive pricing you need relationships with several market makers, and each one is its own paperwork, its own credit line, its own chat window.

Aevo OTC keeps the negotiation and removes both problems. Quotes come from institutional market makers you never have to onboard with individually, you compare them, and execution settles on-chain on mainnet immediately, outside the regular margin system. The counterparty risk that defines conventional OTC isn’t managed, it’s designed out.

The result is institutional pricing and mechanics available to accounts that would never get a desk to pick up the phone. It works in the other direction too. CoinFund’s first on-chain crypto options trade went through Aevo OTC, for the on-chain payoff enforcement rather than for the convenience.

Why is the listed market so bad at altcoin options?

Three structural problems, and none of them is a criticism of any particular exchange. They’re what a central limit order book does when it meets an asset class it wasn’t shaped for.

Thin order books. Most altcoin options carry inadequate market depth. That’s a price-impact tax rather than an inconvenience: executing anything beyond a small clip moves the market against you as it fills. Sophisticated strategies become impossible to implement, not because the strategy is wrong but because putting it on costs more than it can make.

Wide spreads. Bid-ask spreads on altcoin options frequently reach 5% to 10% or more. Read that as a fee, because that’s what it is: a hidden one, charged on entry and again on exit, and large enough to make plenty of otherwise-sound trades economically unfeasible before you’ve taken any market risk at all.

Rigid strikes and expiries. Exchanges list a fixed grid. It’s a one-size-fits-all approach to a set of traders whose needs are anything but. Someone hedging a vesting cliff on a specific date and someone expressing a two-week directional view are not served by the same four strikes and three expiries.

Stack the three and the outcome is the 75% figure. The volume didn’t disappear, it relocated.

There’s a fourth structural fact underneath those three, and it’s the one that explains them. The listed crypto options market is not a broad market with a thin altcoin corner. It is two assets with a rounding error attached. Bitcoin and Ethereum options account for roughly 85% of global options trading volume between them. Open interest is more concentrated still: around 85% of all crypto options open interest sits at a single venue, Deribit, which clears an estimated 75% to 80% of options volume overall.

That concentration is not a problem for BTC and ETH traders. It is excellent for them, and it is why spreads on a front-month BTC option are tight enough to trade around. It is the entire problem for everyone else. A market that concentrated has no spare depth to allocate to an asset that captured attention last week, and the venue holding the depth has no commercial reason to list a grid on it.

So the question “why are altcoin options illiquid on exchanges” has a slightly uncomfortable answer: because listed crypto options liquidity is a BTC and ETH product that also happens to have some other tickers on the board. Demand for altcoin exposure is real and growing, with options volume on assets like Solana and Chainlink up around 35% year on year. The venue capacity to serve it on a book has not moved at the same rate. RFQ is what closes that gap, and it closes it per-request rather than per-listing.

What makes altcoins specifically hard?

Three things that don’t apply to BTC options or ETH options in the same way.

Rapid market rotation. The altcoin market moves attention and liquidity quickly. New assets capture both, and exchange infrastructure struggles to keep pace, so listed options are frequently unavailable on precisely the assets that matter most, at precisely the moment they matter. A listing process that takes weeks is structurally behind a market that rotates in days.

Customization requirements. Altcoin holders have divergent needs. A token founder sitting on a large allocation has fundamentally different hedging requirements from a speculative trader, who has different requirements again from a long-term holder. The founder needs a specific strike on a specific unlock date in size. The trader needs a cheap two-week directional structure. A fixed grid serves neither well and pretends they’re the same customer.

Traditional pricing models don’t fit. Standard options pricing models often fail to capture the volatility characteristics of altcoins, which creates persistent mispricing in exchange environments that rely on them. An RFQ market sidesteps this. Market makers price the specific risk in front of them rather than deriving a quote from a model that was never built for the asset.

That last point is the quiet reason RFQ works better here than a book does. On BTC, the model and the market broadly agree. On a memecoin three weeks after launch, they don’t, and you want a price from someone who is actually willing to warehouse the risk.

Why RFQ handles new asset classes first

The rotation problem above has a bigger version, and it explains why an RFQ desk keeps earning its place on an exchange that also runs a perfectly good options book.

An exchange lists a new asset class long before it can list a liquid options grid on it. The spot market comes first, the perpetual follows, and options arrive last if they arrive at all, because a listed options market needs enough two-sided interest across a spread of strikes and expiries to be worth quoting. That is a much higher bar than listing a single perp.

Aevo went through exactly this on 7 August 2026, when six Ondo tokenized stocks (NVDAon, TSLAon, SPYon, QQQon, HOODon and GOOGLon) went live with spot and matching perpetual futures. A whole asset class arriving at once, with no listed options grid behind it. The pattern repeats every time a new class lands anywhere: traders build exposure, then want to shape it, and the grid isn’t there yet. RFQ is structurally the first mechanism that can answer, because a market maker willing to price one specific request doesn’t need a whole grid to exist first. They need one risk they’re willing to warehouse.

The practical point for you is narrow. The quotable list on Aevo OTC is demand-driven and moves. Roughly 13 assets are quotable at any given time, and trending assets tend to appear. Whether any particular market is quotable today is a question the team answers, not one an article can, and the OTC interface doesn’t show every available asset. Reach out on Discord or in a ticket to ask. It costs nothing and commits you to nothing, which makes asking a cheaper way to find out than assuming.

How does the RFQ model work?

Request for quote. Four steps.

You define the tradeAsset, call or put, strike, expiry, size, direction. This is the part the order book can't offer, because you're specifying the contract rather than selecting one. You set it up with the team on Discord or in a ticket, since every trade is tailor made.

Liquidity providers quoteInstitutional market makers price your specific request and respond with a price and a signature, so you get a committed, executable quote rather than an indication.

You compare and chooseMultiple quotes on the same request, competing on price. Or you decline all of them, which costs nothing.

Settlement is instant and on-chainNo bilateral settlement leg, no waiting.

The competitive dynamic is the point. In a chat-based OTC negotiation you’re usually talking to one desk and have no way to know whether the price is good. Here several market makers quote the same request and you can see what the market actually thinks.

Because you’re only ever quoted your exact request, nothing about your interest is broadcast to the market before it’s filled. The information leakage that makes large orders expensive on a public book doesn’t apply.

Quotes are live for a limited window rather than indefinitely, which is normal behavior for any market maker pricing risk. Treat a quote as something to accept or decline while you’re looking at it, not something to think about overnight.

Who is actually quoting you?

Institutional options market makers, competing on each request. Who is on the other side determines what you can ask for, so it’s worth understanding before you send one.

They are established crypto options market makers that price volatility as their actual business rather than as a feature. That has three practical consequences for you.

They can price things a model can’t. A desk that warehouses altcoin volatility for a living has a view on a three-week memecoin option that no pricing library has. You are asking a human-supervised risk book for a price, not querying a formula. This is why quotes on unusual requests come back at all.

They compete with each other on your specific request. Several desks pricing the same structure is a real auction. In a chat-based OTC negotiation you talk to one desk and have no benchmark. Here the benchmark is the other quotes on your screen.

They are why size clears. A request that would take the listed book several percent of slippage to fill is, to a desk of this type, an ordinary risk transfer. The size that breaks an order book is not the size that breaks a market maker’s book.

The trades that prove the model

Two verifiable examples, both firsts, both from institutions that had every alternative available to them.

CoinFund traded crypto options on Aevo OTC, its first on-chain options trade. CoinFund is a crypto-native investment firm with existing relationships at every major desk. It did not need Aevo OTC for access. It used it for the on-chain enforcement of the payoff.

Re7 Capital executed the first APT option trade on Aevo OTC, shortly after launching its own options desk. An APT option is exactly the trade the listed market cannot serve: a real institutional size in an asset with no meaningful listed grid.

The reason to care about either is not that big names used it. It’s what they used it for. Both are firms that could have transacted bilaterally over chat in fifteen minutes. They chose a venue where the counterparty’s obligation is collateral rather than a promise. That is a statement about settlement risk, made by people who price settlement risk professionally.

Cumulative traded notional across participants runs to a few million dollars and up. That is a working desk rather than a deep one, and it is the honest number: you should size expectations to a venue that is proven rather than saturated.

How a quote is priced: premium, intrinsic value and implied volatility

Almost every question people bring to a desk (is this expensive? why did the price move? why is the far-dated one so much worse?) is answered by the same decomposition, and you can’t argue with a quote you can’t take apart.

The premium you’re quoted is two things added together.

Intrinsic value is what the option would be worth if it expired right now. A put struck at 0.45 on a token trading at 0.40 has 0.05 of intrinsic value. The same put with the token at 0.50 has none. This part isn’t an opinion, it’s arithmetic, and every market maker gets the same number.

Extrinsic value, sometimes called time value, is everything else: what the market will charge you for the possibility that the option finishes further in the money than it is today. This is the whole negotiation. It’s the part that decays as expiry approaches, and the part that a wide quote is made of.

Extrinsic value is driven by three inputs, roughly in order of how much they’ll move your quote:

Implied volatility. How much movement the market maker expects between now and expiry, annualized. This is the single biggest lever on the price of an option, and it’s asset-specific in a way that catches people out. The same 10%-out-of-the-money put costs a fraction as much on BTC as on a token that routinely moves 15% in a day. When a quote comes back much wider than you expected, you are almost always being told something about implied volatility, not about the desk’s appetite for your business.
Time to expiry. More time is more chance of movement, so it costs more, but not linearly. Roughly speaking, doubling the time to expiry costs about 40% more rather than 100% more. That cuts both ways: long-dated protection is better value per day than short-dated protection, and short-dated protection is much cheaper in absolute terms. If a three-month quote looks brutal, price the six-week and compare cost per week before deciding duration is unaffordable.
Distance from spot. The further out of the money a strike is, the cheaper it is and the less likely it is to pay. This is the dial most people should adjust first, because it’s the one where your own view has the most to say.

Two habits follow directly, and they separate people who use the desk well from people who use it once.

Request a ladder, not a point. Ask for three strikes at once, say 10%, 15% and 20% out of the money. What you get back isn’t three prices, it’s the shape of how the market values the tail on that asset. If the 20% strike costs almost as much as the 15%, the market thinks a large move is disproportionately likely and you’ve learned something worth more than the quote.

Separate “expensive” from “wrong”. An option can be correctly priced and still not worth buying, and the two failures look identical on the screen. If the premium is high because implied volatility is high, the market is agreeing with your worry and charging you for it. That’s a fair price for a real risk, and your response is to buy less of it, buy a spread instead, or accept it. If the premium is high because you’ve asked for three months when you needed six weeks, that’s a request you can fix for free.

None of this is unique to Aevo, or to crypto options at all. It’s how options work everywhere. But it matters more on a desk than on a screen, because on a screen you’re taking a price and on a desk you’re specifying the thing being priced, and you can only specify it well if you know which dial does what. The explorer below shows how volatility and strike move the premium.

Figure 1 / Interactive

How strike and volatility change premium per dollar of notional

Implied volatility 45%Strike vs spot +10%

Call premium / notional1.8%

ProfileBTC or ETH style, out of the money

Illustrative 30-day call priced with Black-Scholes and zero rates. Real venues quote their own volatility surfaces.

What if nobody quotes, or the quote is terrible?

Both are real outcomes, and neither costs you anything, so it helps to know what each one is telling you.

A request that draws no quotes is information rather than a failure. Usually it means one of three things: the asset isn’t currently on the quotable list, the size is out of proportion to the risk anyone wants to warehouse in that name, or the expiry is far enough out that nobody wants to hold it. None of those is a permanent state, and none of them is announced anywhere you could have looked up first.

A quote that comes back much wider than you expected is also information, and it’s the more useful of the two. A market maker pricing a risk they don’t want quotes it wide rather than declining, and the width is their estimate of how hard that position is to hedge and hold. Per the section above, that width is mostly an implied-volatility statement. If the premium on a three-month put looks absurd, the market is telling you what it thinks the tail looks like on that asset.

What to do in either case is the same short list:

Try a nearer expiry. Duration is usually the most expensive thing in a request that nobody wants.
Try a smaller clip, then scale. Getting one quote on a third of the size tells you the price and confirms the asset is live.
Try a defined-risk structure rather than an outright. A spread caps the market maker’s exposure as well as yours, and it’s frequently quotable when a naked leg isn’t.
Ask again on a calmer day. Quotes reflect the risk on the day, and the day matters more on thin names than on BTC.

The general habit: treat a request as a probe, not a commitment. It costs nothing, it commits you to nothing, and the answer, including no answer, tells you something you can’t find on a screen.

What should a good request contain?

Six fields, and the quality of the quote depends on how deliberately you fill them.

Asset. Check with the team that it’s quotable before building the rest of the request around it, since the OTC interface doesn’t show every available asset.
Direction and type. Buying or selling, call or put. Selling is available too, and it’s the half most people forget the desk can price.
Strike. Name the level that matters to your position, not the nearest round number. This is the whole reason you’re here rather than on the book.
Expiry. Weekly, biweekly and monthly out to three months. Land on the date the risk actually ends, not the one before it.
Size. The full clip. Splitting a large request into pieces to look smaller works against you, since pricing the whole thing at once is the advantage the venue has.
Whether you’d take the other side at a price. Not a field, but worth knowing before you look at the quote. Deciding your walk-away number first is the difference between comparing quotes and being anchored by the first one.

One habit pays immediately: request two or three strikes at once rather than one. The way premium changes across strikes tells you where the market makers think the risk sits, and that shape is information a single quote can’t give you.

Can I sell to the desk, not just buy from it?

Yes, and it’s the half of the venue that gets least attention.

An RFQ is a two-way mechanism. You can request a price to sell an option as readily as to buy one, and the same institutional market makers will quote it. That opens the income side of the book on assets where there’s no listed market to sell into at all.

Two shapes come up most often:

Selling upside against a holding. If you hold a large allocation you’re not going to sell but don’t expect to run, a call sold at a level you’d be content to be capped at converts a flat expectation into premium. Because settlement is cash, you don’t need to lodge the tokens anywhere. What backs the short leg is margin, not inventory.
Selling the wing you don’t believe in. Inside a structure, the leg you sell funds the leg you buy. That’s the mechanism behind a collar costing close to nothing, and on the desk you can specify both legs and be quoted the net.

Two things to be clear-eyed about before you sell anything. A short option is a position with an obligation attached, and dynamic margin means the requirement moves against you as the position does. And a wide quote on the sell side is the same signal as on the buy side, read in the other direction: if a market maker will pay you a lot for a strike, they’re telling you what they think the risk of that strike is.

Can I request a multi-leg structure?

Yes, and it’s the use case where the desk’s advantage compounds fastest.

A collar, a spread, a straddle or a condor is several contracts that only make sense together. Building one on an order book means executing each leg separately, and that introduces two costs the payoff diagram never mentions.

Legging risk. Between filling your first leg and your last, the market moves. On a liquid BTC options book that’s a small, tolerable cost. On a thin altcoin book where each leg might take minutes to work, you can finish with a structure meaningfully different from the one you priced, or with one leg on and the other unfilled, which is not a defined-risk position at all. It’s a naked one you didn’t intend.

Stacked spreads and stacked fees. Every leg crosses its own bid-ask. Four legs on a book quoting 5% to 10% each is a structure that has to overcome a substantial hole before it makes a penny, and taker fees compound on top of that on venues that charge them.

An RFQ removes both. You describe the whole structure and get one net price for the package, executed as a unit. Nothing is half-on. The market maker prices the combined risk rather than four separate risks, which is usually better for you as well, because the legs partly offset each other and a desk warehousing the net position needs less compensation than four desks warehousing four gross ones.

Two practical notes:

Ask for the net, not the legs. What you want to compare is the package price against your own view of fair value for the structure. A breakdown per leg is interesting; the net is the decision.
This is where zero exchange fees do the most work. On a four-leg structure, a per-leg taker fee is charged four times on entry and four times on exit. Removing that layer entirely changes which structures are worth putting on at all, particularly the defined-risk ones, where the premium is small enough that fees are a real fraction of it.

If you’ve avoided multi-leg crypto options because the execution was more trouble than the structure was worth, this is the specific thing that changed.

Why not just use the exchange order book?

For standard-size ETH options or BTC options, use the order book. It’s tighter and faster.

The OTC desk earns its place in three situations.

Size. A large order on a public book moves the price against you as it fills, and everyone watching sees it happen. That’s slippage plus information leakage, and it compounds. RFQ prices the whole clip at once.

Strike and expiry. Listed contracts sit on a fixed grid. If you want protection at a specific level, or an expiry that lines up with an unlock, the grid rarely has it. On OTC you name the strike, and maturities run weekly, biweekly and monthly out to three months, which is enough granularity to land on the date that matters rather than the nearest one available.

Assets that aren’t liquid on-screen. Altcoin and memecoin options simply don’t have deep listed books. Institutional liquidity providers will still price them, across roughly 13 assets at any given time, with the available list adjusting as demand moves. The OTC interface doesn’t show every available asset, so ask the team on Discord or in a ticket about any that aren’t listed. Trending assets tend to appear, which is the direct answer to the rotation problem above.

The arithmetic on size, done once

The size argument is usually made qualitatively, which makes it easy to nod at and ignore. Here it is with numbers. They’re illustrative, since your book, your asset and your day all differ, but the shape is what matters and the shape is stable.

Say you want 500 contracts of an altcoin put. The screen shows a mid of 1.00, a spread of 8%, and 80 contracts available at the touch, with each level up a little worse.

Sweeping the book:

The first 80 fill at the offer, 1.04.
The next levels are progressively worse as you eat through them. Say you clear the remaining 420 at an average of 1.12, a plausible outcome on a book that thin, with the last portion filling at a level set partly by your own buying.
Blended average: roughly 1.11. Against a 1.00 mid, that’s about 11% of premium paid away on entry alone.
Add the taker fee on each fill, and add that the whole market watched you do it.
Then remember you pay a version of the same cost again on the way out.

One RFQ for all 500:

Market makers price the full clip as a single risk and compete against each other for it.
Suppose the best quote comes back at 1.05. That’s 5% over mid rather than 11%.
Zero exchange fees, so nothing is added afterwards.
Nothing was broadcast before the fill.

On this example the difference is roughly 6% of premium, or about 30 units of currency on a 500-contract trade priced near 1.00, on entry, with a similar saving available on exit. The absolute number scales directly with size, which is the whole point. The RFQ advantage is not a fixed discount, it’s a function of how much of the book you were going to eat.

That tells you where the line sits. In small size on a liquid ETH or BTC option, the book’s tight spread beats an RFQ and you should use it. As size rises relative to displayed depth, the sweep cost grows and the quote cost doesn’t. Somewhere in between, they cross. Knowing roughly where that crossover sits for the things you actually trade is worth more than any general rule, and the cheap way to find out is to price the same trade both ways a few times and watch.

A worked example: hedging a token unlock

The clearest case for the desk, worked through, because it’s the one where every advantage on this page applies at once and it’s usually described rather than costed.

The situation. You hold 2,000,000 tokens of a project you’re involved with. They unlock in roughly ten weeks. The token trades around 0.50, so the position is worth about 1,000,000 USDC. You are not trying to call the top. You are trying to make sure the position is still worth something meaningful on the other side of the unlock, because a large tranche vesting into a thin market is a known event with a known direction of pressure.

Why the listed book can’t do this.

The date. The unlock is on a specific day. The listed grid, if this asset even has one, carries monthly expiries that land before or after it. A put expiring two weeks early protects you through the wrong window.
The size. A million dollars of downside protection on a mid-cap altcoin is several times the visible depth of any listed book on that name. Sweeping it would move the price of protection substantially as you bought it.
The signal. Buying that much visible downside on your own token, on a public book, in the weeks before your own unlock, is a message to the market. It is also a message you did not intend to send.

What the request looks like. A put, strike 0.45, which is 10% below spot and the level below which the position stops being what you planned around, expiring the Friday after the unlock date, size 2,000,000 tokens. One request, one clip, quoted by several market makers who never see each other’s prices.

What the quote does and doesn’t buy you. Say the best quote comes back at 0.025 per token: 50,000 USDC, or 5% of the position, for ten weeks of a hard floor at 0.45. Two things follow, and both are the point of doing the arithmetic rather than the vibes.

You have converted an unbounded outcome into a bounded one. Below 0.45 your position stops falling. The worst case is now the distance from 0.50 to 0.45, plus the premium, so roughly 150,000 USDC on a million-dollar position, rather than whatever the market decides to do to a thin book on unlock day.
The premium is the number to argue with, not the structure. 5% for ten weeks is either cheap or expensive depending on what you think the unlock does. If it looks expensive, that is the market’s estimate of the same risk you’re worried about, priced by people who have to hold it.

Two variations worth pricing at the same time, since requesting several at once costs nothing:

A collar. Sell a call at 0.65 to fund most or all of the put. You give up the upside above 0.65, which, if the unlock goes badly, you were never going to see anyway, and the net cost falls towards zero. For a treasury that needs the downside gone and doesn’t need the tail, this is usually the better trade.
A put spread. Buy the 0.45 put and sell a 0.35 put against it. Cheaper than the outright, and it protects the band you actually care about rather than the whole way to zero. If you think the realistic bad case is a 20% drawdown rather than a collapse, you’re paying for the part you believe in.

What makes this an on-chain trade rather than a chat-window one. The market maker on the other side posts 30% initial margin in USDC and tops it up against mark-to-market, all locked on-chain. If the token halves and your put is deep in the money, the payoff is enforced by collateral rather than by a counterparty’s willingness to honor it, which, on the single trade where you most need it to work, is a materially different proposition. And if the unlock is delayed or the thesis changes at week four, the early unwind route below means you’re not carrying a position you no longer want just because there’s no listed bid.

The general shape transfers to any known date in size: a vesting cliff, a treasury de-risking ahead of a raise, a fund with a reporting date. The listed grid is organized around calendar convenience; your risk is organized around an event. That mismatch is the whole reason this venue exists.

How do you hedge beyond three months?

By rolling, and it’s worth planning the roll before you put the first position on, because three months is the maximum maturity on the desk and plenty of the risks people come here to hedge run longer than that.

A twelve-month vesting schedule, a treasury that needs a permanent floor, a fund hedging a strategic holding: none of those fit inside a single contract. What you buy instead is three months of protection and a commitment to buy the next three when this one is most of the way through.

The mechanics

The roll is two trades, and on this desk they’re both RFQs.

Unwind the existing position at mark, or let it expire if it’s out of the money and close to the date. If it’s in the money, unwinding captures the value rather than waiting for cash settlement to do it.
Request the replacement at the new strike and the new expiry, in the same request cycle if you can, so you’re comparing the net cost of moving rather than two prices in isolation.

Whether you can do both as a single package is worth asking the desk rather than assuming. The general principle from the multi-leg section applies: a market maker pricing the combined change in risk usually gives you a better number than two separate requests, because the legs offset.

What the roll actually costs

Three things move, and only one of them is obvious.

Time value, which you pay again. Each roll buys a fresh block of extrinsic value. Because premium doesn’t scale linearly with time, since doubling the maturity adds roughly 40% rather than 100%, four rolled three-month hedges cost meaningfully more than one twelve-month hedge would have, if one existed. That’s the structural cost of the three-month ceiling, and it’s a real number rather than an inconvenience. Price it into the decision to hedge at all.
Implied volatility, repriced on the day. The biggest risk in a rolling program is not the fee, it’s that you’re re-buying protection at whatever volatility costs on the roll date. If the asset has just moved violently, that’s exactly when the next three months are most expensive and exactly when you least want to be unhedged. A rolling hedge does not lock in a price of protection; it locks in a floor for three months at a time.
The strike, which has probably moved. If spot has fallen, rolling to the same percentage out-of-the-money means a lower absolute floor. If it has risen, the old strike is now far out of the money and cheap to keep but not protecting much. Deciding in advance whether you’re rolling to a level or to a distance from spot is the difference between a hedging policy and a series of improvisations.

Three habits that make rolling work

Roll early, not on expiry day. Time decay accelerates towards expiry, so the last two weeks of a contract are the least efficient protection you own, and the market knows you’re a forced buyer if you leave it to the last session. Starting the conversation two to three weeks out is usually the sweet spot.
Ladder rather than cliff. Instead of one three-month position rolled entirely at once, run two or three staggered positions with overlapping expiries. You still hold continuous protection, and no single roll date can hand you a bad volatility print on the whole book. It costs you nothing extra beyond a few more requests.
Write the policy down. How far out of the money, how long before expiry you roll, what you do if the quote comes back at twice last quarter’s price. A treasury hedging on judgment alone tends to hedge most enthusiastically right after a fall, which is the most expensive moment to do it.

The honest summary: rolling works, and it is not free. If your risk genuinely runs for a year, price four rolls rather than one contract, assume at least one of them lands on an expensive day, and decide whether the protection is still worth it under that assumption. If it is, the three-month ceiling is an operational detail. If it isn’t, better to know before the first premium is paid.

What does it cost?

Zero exchange fees on Aevo OTC.

That’s more meaningful in options than in perps. On a multi-leg options structure, taker fees compound across every leg, and on smaller premiums the fee can be a sizeable share of what you’re paying for the position. Removing the fee layer entirely removes that.

Your real cost is the spread inside the quote, which is exactly the number the RFQ process is designed to compress. Multiple providers pricing the same request compete that spread down. You see the all-in price before you commit, and there’s nothing added afterwards.

Set that against the 5% to 10% spreads common on listed altcoin options and the comparison stops being about fees at all. Zero fees on a competed spread versus standard fees on an uncompeted one is not a marginal difference, and it widens with every leg you add.

There’s a second-order fee point that only shows up if you’re a staker. Aevo’s staking tiers carry a trading fee discount of up to 20%, but it excludes options fees. So the discount you’ve locked capital for does not reach your listed options trading at all. On OTC the question doesn’t arise, because there is no exchange fee to discount. For a trader whose volume is mostly options, that’s the honest comparison: full freight on the book, nothing on the desk.

If a position is liquidated, the fee is 0.5% of the transaction amount.

Does OTC volume count towards the rewards?

Yes, and on the same delta-weighted basis as any other options volume, which is worth understanding before you build a volume plan around the desk.

The year-end Mega Reward distribution requires 10M in qualifying volume, counting perps and options. Options contribute as contracts × underlying spot price × |delta|, not at face value. A deep in-the-money option with a delta near 1 contributes close to its full notional; a far out-of-the-money option with a delta of 0.1 contributes a tenth of it.

Two consequences specific to the desk:

Size helps you here and cheapness doesn’t. A large, near-the-money hedge on OTC contributes substantially towards the threshold. A stack of cheap far out-of-the-money lottery tickets contributes very little, however many of them you buy.
The absence of exchange fees makes the volume cheaper to build than the same volume on the book. The delta-weighted contribution is the same, and you paid no taker fee to get it.

A rolling hedge compounds that quietly: each roll is a fresh pair of trades and each one contributes delta-weighted volume, so a genuine long-term hedging program builds towards the threshold as a by-product of doing what you were going to do anyway.

None of which is a reason to trade for the sake of the counter. But if you’re going to put a hedge on anyway, where you put it changes what it costs you and not what it earns you, and that asymmetry points one way.

Aevo’s leaderboard shows your cumulative qualifying volume, your staking tier and your projected year-end USDC reward in real time, so the effect of routing a hedge through the desk rather than the book is something you can watch rather than estimate. The 2026 pool is projected at roughly 808,800 USDC. It’s at app.aevo.xyz/leaderboard.

What actually happens at expiry?

This decides how much operational work an OTC position costs you, and the answer is: almost none.

Aevo’s options are European-style, cash-settled in USDC, expiring at 08:00 UTC. Each of those three is doing real work, and together they remove most of the expiry-day admin that traders coming from equity options are braced for.

European-style. The option can only be settled at expiry. There is no early exercise at any point in its life.
Cash-settled. Nothing is delivered. At expiry the position settles against the final price in cash, and an in-the-money option pays out automatically. You never receive or hand over the underlying token.
Settled in USDC. Premiums and payoffs are denominated in the stablecoin, which is also what backs the position. Your PnL on the structure and the collateral behind it are in the same unit.
08:00 UTC. Not a US market close, and not midnight. If you’re timing a hedge against an event, that’s the clock the contract runs on.

Four practical consequences follow, roughly in order of how often they matter.

You cannot be assigned early on a short leg. This is the big one for anyone who has sold options on equities. A short call that goes deep in the money does not get exercised against you at some inconvenient moment before expiry. It sits there and settles in cash on the expiry date. Whatever the position is worth, you know when you’ll find out.

You don’t need to hold the underlying to sell a call against it. Because settlement is cash, a call you sell has no delivery obligation attached. What you need is margin, not inventory, which is what the dynamic margin system below is for, and a large part of why selling structures are practical on a desk like this.

There’s nothing to submit and nothing to forget. No exercise instruction, no do-not-exercise notice, no expiry-day checklist. An in-the-money option pays; an out-of-the-money one expires worthless. Both happen without you.

Expiry is a date, not a decision. Which puts the weight back where it belongs: on choosing the expiry when you place the request, and on the early-unwind route below if the thesis changes before you get there.

How is margin handled?

On-chain dynamic margin, which is the part that separates this from most decentralized options venues.

The common approach on an options dex is full collateralization: to sell a call, lock the entire underlying. Safe, simple, and capital-destroying. A structure with defined, limited risk still ties up collateral as though the risk were unlimited.

Dynamic margin instead assesses what the position can actually lose and requires margin against that. If your risk is bounded, your margin reflects it. Capital that would otherwise sit idle stays available.

The same logic runs on the other side of the trade, and it’s the reason the counterparty risk goes away rather than being politely ignored. Liquidity providers post 30% initial margin in USDC when they take the other side, and a variation margin system prompts them to top up as the position moves mark-to-market against them. All of it is locked on-chain. In a chat-based OTC trade, the desk’s obligation to you is its reputation. Here it’s collateral you can verify.

For anyone running several positions at once, the capital efficiency is usually the difference between the strategy being viable and not. OTC margin is separate from your exchange account: OTC trades happen on mainnet, outside the regular margin system, so this collateral doesn’t net against your perps or listed options. For netting on the exchange, see unified margin.

Can I get out before expiry?

Yes. Early unwind at mark price.

This is the question that decides whether an OTC position is usable, and it’s where conventional crypto OTC is weakest. A bilaterally negotiated option is typically something you hold to expiry, because getting out means going back to the same desk and accepting whatever they feel like quoting.

Early unwind was the headline change in OTC V2, and it works the same way as entry. You submit an unwind request to the institutional market makers and take a price, capturing whatever the position has made on spot moves or on implied volatility. If your thesis changes at week two of a twelve-week option, you act on it.

Be precise about how this sits alongside the European-style exercise above, because the two are easy to conflate. European-style means you cannot exercise early, so you can’t force the payoff before the expiry date. It has never meant you can’t exit early. Unwinding is a trade: you sell the position back into the market at its current value, the same way you’d close any other position. The distinction matters because it’s the reason a European-style contract isn’t the trap it sounds like.

One thing to be realistic about, and it’s the mirror image of the “what if nobody quotes” section above. An unwind is a request, and a request is answered by whoever wants the risk that day. The same three factors that make an opening request hard to fill (an asset that’s gone quiet, a size out of proportion to appetite, a difficult expiry) apply to getting out of it. In practice the position is easier to unwind than to open, because a market maker buying back risk they already understand is a simpler ask than one taking it on cold. But “unwind at mark” is a route, not a guarantee of a particular price, and the honest way to plan is the same as anywhere else on this page: probe early rather than urgently, and be willing to unwind in clips if the full size doesn’t come back at a level you like.

Combined with the strike and expiry flexibility, that changes what OTC is for. It stops being a one-shot bet you’re locked into and becomes a position you can run, and a position you can run is a position you can hedge with, which is a different proposition entirely.

Aevo OTC against the alternatives

Feature

Aevo OTC

Aevo order book

Chat-based OTC desk

Strike / expiry

Any strike; weekly, biweekly, monthly to 3 months

Listed contracts only

Negotiable

Size

Institutional, quoted as one clip

Limited by book depth

Institutional

Typical altcoin spread

Competed across LPs

Frequently 5% to 10%+

One desk's number

Exchange fees

Zero

Standard taker/maker

Varies, often embedded

Staking fee discount

N/A, no fee to discount

Doesn't apply to options

N/A

Multi-leg execution

One net price, filled as a unit

Leg by leg, each crossing a spread

Negotiable

Counterparty risk

On-chain collateral, 30% LP initial margin

Settled on-chain

Bilateral, reputational

Settlement

Instant, on mainnet

Instant, on the Aevo L2

Manual, often delayed

Exercise style

European, cash-settled in USDC

Negotiated

Price competition

Multiple LPs quote

Public book

Usually one desk

Early exit

Unwind at mark

Trade out on book

Renegotiate with desk

Onboarding

One venue

Per desk

Altcoin coverage

Around 13 assets, demand-driven. Ask the team about others

Liquid assets

Broad

Information leakage

None pre-fill

Visible in book

None pre-fill

Who is this for?

Four profiles, honestly assessed.

Traders sizing beyond the book. If your order would visibly move the market you’re trading in, RFQ is not a preference, it’s the correct instrument.
Anyone wanting a specific strike or date. Hedging a token unlock, an unwind schedule or a vesting cliff means matching a date the listed grid won’t have.
Traders working in altcoins and memecoins. There is no deep listed options book for most of these. There are market makers willing to price them.
Token founders and treasuries. A large allocation with a known unlock schedule is the clearest case for a bespoke strike on a bespoke date, in size, without signaling it to the market first. That’s a trade the listed grid cannot do at any price, and it’s the one worked through above.

The common thread across all four is the actual selection rule: use the desk when the thing you want to trade is defined by a constraint the grid doesn’t have a column for. A date. A size. An asset. A strike. A structure that has to arrive all at once. If your trade fits neatly into a listed contract in normal size, take the book. It’s tighter and faster, and there’s no prize for routing a simple trade through a complicated venue.

If you’re buying a standard ETH call in normal size, the order book is the better venue. Aevo OTC is for the trades the screen can’t do.

Does an OTC position hedge my perps?

It hedges the price risk, not the margin.

An OTC option does not sit in your Aevo exchange account. OTC trades happen on mainnet, not on the Aevo L2, and are outside the regular margin system. If you’re long ETH perps and you buy downside protection through OTC at a strike and expiry the listed grid doesn’t offer, the protection pays out as agreed, but it does not net against the perp for margin. Size the perp’s collateral as if the hedge weren’t there. For hedges that do lower the perp’s requirement, see how cross margin perps & options work together on the exchange.

Four cases where this matters, roughly in order of how often they come up.

Coverage. The built-in one-tap hedge perps with options protection runs on BTC and ETH perpetual futures only. The exchange lists a great many more markets than two. If you’re long an altcoin perp in size, there is no one-tap floor to reach for, but the desk can quote you a put on it. Same downside protection logic, applied where the exchange’s own grid runs out.

Dates. A put that expires the Friday before a vesting cliff is worth considerably more than a put that expires the Friday after, and the listed grid has no obligation to carry either. With expiry landing at 08:00 UTC, “the Friday before” is a precise instruction rather than an approximate one.

Duration. PERPS+ tops out at a two-month enhancer. If you’re hedging a six-month view, OTC’s three-month maturities and the rolling program above are the route. Because OTC sits outside the regular margin system, the hedge won’t reduce the margin on an exchange perp, so budget collateral for both.

Size. A hedge large enough to move the listed book is a hedge that costs you more the more of it you buy. RFQ prices it once.

Five mistakes that cost money on an RFQ desk

None of these are exotic. They’re the ones that show up repeatedly when someone brings order-book habits to a quote-driven venue.

1. Splitting the size to look smaller. On a public book, working a large order in clips is correct: it hides your hand and limits impact. On an RFQ desk it’s backwards. The whole advantage is that a market maker prices one large risk once, and competing desks bid for the privilege. Break it into five requests and you’ve turned your single best feature into five smaller, worse ones, and you’ve told the desk five times that you’re a buyer.

2. Anchoring on the first quote. Decide your walk-away number before you look. A quote is a fact about the market, not a verdict on your trade, and the only way to know whether it’s good is to have decided what good looks like first. This costs nothing and takes thirty seconds.

3. Buying duration you don’t need. Time is the most expensive input in a quote after volatility, and it’s the one people over-buy most reliably, usually by rounding an eight-week risk up to three months to be safe. You are paying for four weeks of optionality you already know you don’t want. Land the expiry on the date the risk actually ends.

4. Treating a wide quote as an insult. It’s a price, and it’s usually an implied-volatility statement about the asset rather than a comment on your business. The productive response is to change the request, with a nearer expiry, a smaller clip or a defined-risk structure, rather than to conclude the desk isn’t interested. See the pricing section above for which dial to turn.

5. Waiting until you urgently need the exit, or the roll. The unwind route works, but it works best when you’re early and calm. Probing an unwind at week four of a twelve-week position, when you don’t have to take the price, tells you what liquidity in that name actually looks like, and it means the day you do need out, you already know. The same applies to a roll: arriving at expiry week as a forced buyer is the most expensive way to extend a hedge.

The connecting idea: on a book, execution quality is about timing. On a desk, it’s about specification. The work happens before you submit the request, not after.

Getting started

The desk is a separate interface from the main exchange at app.aevo.xyz. It doesn’t list every available asset and every trade is tailor made, so start by reaching out to the team on Discord or in a ticket.

Worth doing on your first request: submit one you’re prepared to decline. Quotes cost nothing and commit you to nothing, and seeing what institutional pricing on your asset and strike actually looks like tells you more than any amount of reading. Compare it against what the listed book would have cost you in slippage on the same size, using the arithmetic section above as the template, and the decision usually makes itself.

A second habit worth building early: request the same structure at two or three different strikes at once. The shape of how premium changes across strikes tells you where the market makers think the risk is, and that’s information you can’t get from a single quote.

And one thing not to over-think. There’s no published minimum that makes a request too small to bother with, and no cost to finding out. If your instinct is that a trade sits just outside what the book can do comfortably, that instinct is the signal to ask rather than to assume you belong on the screen.

Full documentation is in the Aevo OTC docs and the trading guide.

WHERE TO GO NEXT

If you want the option itself, Aevo is an options dex. To hedge perps with options in one tap, PERPS+ attaches a floor, a ceiling or both to a BTC or ETH perp. If calls, puts and premium are unfamiliar, options trading explained covers the building blocks. See every product side by side on the Aevo products page.

Quick answers

What is Aevo OTC?

Has anyone institutional actually traded on Aevo OTC?

Why are altcoin options so illiquid on exchanges?

How does an options RFQ work on Aevo?

What does Aevo OTC cost to trade?

Which assets can I trade options on through Aevo OTC?

What strikes and expiries can I request?

How do I hedge something that runs longer than three months?

Why is my options quote so expensive?

Does a longer expiry cost proportionally more?

Is there counterparty risk on Aevo OTC?

Can I exit an Aevo OTC position before expiry?

Can I trade multi-leg options structures on Aevo OTC?

When should I use Aevo OTC instead of the order book?

Does OTC options volume count towards Aevo rewards?

Every OTC trade is tailor made

The OTC interface doesn’t show every available asset. Reach out to the team on Discord or in a ticket and they’ll set up the trade with you.

Reach out on Discord

KEEP GOING

Learn

Trading strategies

Product

Aevo MCP

Product

Staking

MATURITIES

WEEKLY, BIWEEKLY, MONTHLY TO 3 MONTHS

SETTLEMENT

EUROPEAN, CASH-SETTLED IN USDC

EXPIRY

08:00 UTC

EXCHANGE FEES

ZERO

PRODUCT / OTC / RFQ OPTIONS

This page is for information only and isn’t financial advice. Options and perpetual futures are high-risk products and you can lose your full position.

PRODUCT

Unified margin

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Crypto OTC desk

What is an on-chain OTC desk?