Bybit Founder Ben Zhou: Options Product Liquidity Among Market Leaders, Soon to Launch Stocks and Stock Options
Ben Zhou, founder of Bybit, stated that the options department was established in 2021. After years of product iterations and upgrades, Bybit Options now offers one of the deepest liquidity in the market and has achieved combined margin with other product lines on the platform.
Zhou announced that Bybit will soon launch TradFi stocks and stock options, reflecting the strategic shift of the crypto trading platform from "pure digital assets" to "traditional financial assets."
This move reflects the trend of "product diversification" in crypto exchanges by 2026: Bitget, OKX, KuCoin, and others have already launched stock tokens and US stock options, with Bybit following suit to form a "crypto + traditional" dual-track product line to meet users' demand for "one-stop trading."
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
Bybit's expansion into "stocks + options" is not an isolated action but a continuation of the "de-crypto" wave for crypto exchanges in 2025-2026: Bitget will launch US stock token trading in 2025, OKX will introduce stock options in 2026, and KuCoin will launch "stock tokens + index futures" in 2025. This reflects the survival strategy of crypto exchanges after the "crypto winter": shifting from "pure crypto" to "all assets."
Similar cases can be compared to FTX's ambition for a "full asset platform" in 2023—offering trading across all categories including US stocks, commodities, crypto, NFTs, etc., but collapsed due to risk management failures; Bybit opts for a "gradual expansion": options in 2021 → stocks in 2026 → potential future expansion into commodities/forex, forming a robust path of "product diversification + risk isolation."
On the capital path, Bybit chooses a "liquidity-first + combined margin" dual-track strategy: the options market provides deep liquidity, reducing slippage and bid-ask spreads, while combined margin allows users to share margin across product lines (spot, futures, options, stocks), enhancing capital efficiency, similar to Deribit's "options + futures" combined margin model in the 2020s.
Essentially, this belongs to the "exchange paradigm shift" within the reconstruction of the industrial chain: moving from "crypto-specific" to "universal all-assets." The mechanistic reason is that the decline in volatility in the crypto market (with BTC's annualized volatility dropping below 40% in 2025-2026) makes "pure crypto" insufficient to support growth, compelling exchanges to expand into "traditional assets" to acquire new users and trading volume.
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