Bybit Launches Equity Perp Options While Hyperliquid HIP-3 Scales Stock Perps

Bybit announced Perp Options on September 8, an equity perpetual options product going live September 17 at 8PM UTC with SPCX and NVDA. TSLA, QQQ, SOXL and MU are queued behind them. The contracts settle in USDT, trade in fractional lots, and plug into Unified Trading Account and Portfolio Margin.

That is the second major venue in six months to decide that crypto rails should carry equity exposure around the clock. Hyperliquid got there first through HIP-3, where permissionless market deployers already list equity and commodity perps that trade continuously, including through the weekend when NYSE is dark.

Perp Options and Perps Are Not the Same Instrument

A perpetual option has no expiry and charges a funding style payment to hold the position. Your exposure is convex: the maximum loss on a long is the premium stream, and the payoff accelerates as the underlying moves in your favour.

A perpetual future is linear. One dollar of NVDA movement is one dollar of PnL per unit of exposure, and the position can be liquidated. Funding is the mechanism that anchors it to spot.

That difference matters most in exactly the situation these products exist to capture: an earnings gap. If NVDA gaps 12 percent after the close, a perp long holds the full move and a perp short is likely liquidated somewhere in the middle of the gap with no chance to add margin. A long option holder captures the move with a loss floored at the premium already paid.

The tradeoff is cost. Convexity is never free, and perpetual option funding tends to run expensive precisely when implied volatility is high, which is when traders most want to own it.

Weekend Gaps Are the Real Product

Every 24/7 equity derivative is, structurally, a market in the weekend gap. US cash equities trade roughly 32.5 hours a week. A perpetual on the same underlying trades 168. The other 135.5 hours are pure price discovery with no underlying market to arbitrage against.

That is why orderflow reads differently on these instruments than on BTC perps. Depth thins out dramatically outside US hours, and a $200,000 market order that barely registers at 3PM ET can move an equity perp several tenths of a percent at 4AM UTC on a Sunday.

Two consequences follow. First, order book imbalance becomes a much stronger short horizon signal on thin books than on deep ones, because a single resting size imbalance actually represents the available liquidity rather than a fraction of it. Second, funding rate extremes on equity perps mean something different: with no spot leg to arbitrage during the weekend, funding drifts on pure positioning rather than being pinned by basis traders.

Where the Two Venues Diverge

Hyperliquid HIP-3 markets are deployed permissionlessly and settle on chain, so every fill, every position and every liquidation is publicly visible. You can attribute flow to a wallet. When a single address opens a $138 million short in a commodity perp, that is observable in real time, not inferred from aggregate open interest.

Bybit Perp Options run on a centralised matching engine with Portfolio Margin cross collateralisation. Better capital efficiency for a multi leg book, zero wallet level transparency. You get aggregate open interest and nothing about who holds it.

For a directional trader that difference is a preference. For anyone building signals on positioning data it is the whole game, because a strategy that keys on whale accumulation cannot be reconstructed from aggregate data no matter how clean the feed is.

The Positioning Data to Track Once These Go Live

Three metrics separate a functioning 24/7 equity market from a thin one that traps you on Sunday night.

Open interest relative to the equity underlying average daily volume. If NVDA perp OI runs into the hundreds of millions while the perp itself turns over a fraction of that, the position is concentrated and the unwind will be violent.

Funding differential between weekday and weekend sessions. A perp that pays heavily positive funding only during Saturday and Sunday is telling you longs are paying up for gap exposure that has no hedge available, which historically resolves against them at Monday open.

Depth at 50 basis points, measured hourly rather than as a daily average. The average hides the exact hours when a liquidation cascade becomes possible.

Buildix tracks funding, open interest, order book imbalance and CVD across Hyperliquid HIP-3 markets alongside 530 crypto perpetual pairs, so equity and commodity perps sit in the same screener as BTC and HYPE. The screener at buildix.trade/screener filters by funding extreme and OI change across all of them at once.

Two venues launching 24/7 equity derivatives inside one year is not a coincidence of product roadmaps. It is a bet that traders want exposure to NVDA at 3AM on a Sunday badly enough to pay funding for it. The orderflow over the first few weekends after September 17 will show whether that bet is right.