DRV has hit another all-time high, pushing its price to around $0.56.

The on-chain options sector is officially gaining momentum, and trading gateways are increasing along with it. Professional traders can use Derive directly, while new applications built around retail user experience are beginning to offer simpler interfaces and early incentives.

Dreaming

Robinhood brought zero-day options to US retail traders, and Dreaming wants to do the same in Crypto. Users select an asset on the Dreaming APP, bet on whether it will go up or down, then choose a strike price and expiration date to complete a trade. Beyond BTC, ETH, and SOL, it also offers options on assets like HYPE, PUMP, and LIT, attempting to cover the speculative demand that crypto traders are more familiar with.

Its underlying infrastructure has also changed. Dreaming V2 uses Derive's infrastructure, while V3 adopts a self-built RFQ inquiry system that sends orders to institutional market makers, with multiple institutions competing to quote.

This step addresses the long-standing problem of options liquidity. For the same BTC, the spot market only needs to concentrate buy and sell orders around a single trading pair; in the options market, different strike prices and different expiration dates each split off their own order book. The more assets there are and the shorter the tenors, the more dispersed the quotes market makers need to maintain. RFQ allows market makers to quote specifically for the contract a trader wants to buy or sell, and large orders can be inquired as a whole, reducing the impact of eating through the order book level by level.

Participating in interactions earns Dream Points. According to the official points announcement, traders who participated in the closed beta from January 14 to July 15 have been allocated 500,000 Genesis Points, and traders from September 25 to October 6 received an additional 100,000. Starting from October 16, Dream Points will be distributed every Friday.

HEAT, Derive's Trading Frontend

Dreaming chose to build its own inquiry system, while HEAT continues to build a trading terminal around Derive.

Its distinguishing feature is plotting options directly on price charts. Strike prices, break-even points, expiration times, and profit zones are all visible at a glance, and traders can drag lines to adjust the price and tenor they want to bet on. Traditional options chains require readers to search through row after row of options contracts for what they want, whereas HEAT attempts to let traders first express their judgment on a chart, then turn that judgment into a specific trade.

This user-friendly interface is especially suited to answering a common question: if I think the price will rise, which option should I buy?

For the same bullish view on BTC, expecting a rise tomorrow versus expecting a rise next month requires different contracts; expecting a small rise versus expecting a big rise calls for different trade structures. By putting breakeven points and expiration dates together, traders can at least see under what conditions their judgment needs to play out.

HEAT offers four ways to operate. You can drag directly on the chart, or choose up, down, or large swing in quick mode and fill in the target and amount invested; those familiar with options can select contracts from the option chain, or build multi-leg strategies in custom mode. These methods share the information of the same trade, and the chart and trading panel update in sync.

The structures supported initially include calls, puts, call spreads, put spreads, straddles, and strangles. The latter two allow traders to express a view on large swings without having to bet on only one direction. Custom mode requests quotes from market makers through Derive, with multiple legs quoted as one combination and executed all at once or not at all, avoiding a situation where only half of the combination is filled.

HEAT also plans features for observing trader performance, following, and copy trading. In options trading, which asset someone is bullish on only tells you part of the information; the length of tenor, strike price, and structure they choose are what explain the conditions this trade is really betting on.

HEAT has already launched in sync with Derive V3, and there are currently no confirmable points or airdrop commitments.

PaperTrade

Turning from options to perpetual contracts, the PerpDEX that has recently attracted attention is undoubtedly PaperTrade.

PaperTrade has already opened pre-deposits. According to the official launch announcement, formal trading is expected to begin about one hour after the HyperEVM network upgrade on October 11. Depositing earlier during the pre-deposit phase offers no extra advantage; topping up in advance is mainly to avoid account creation and deposit congestion when formal trading begins.

We previously introduced its mechanism in "Zero Funding Rate? The New HyperEVM Contract Design Everyone Abroad Is Talking About". PaperTrade reads Hyperliquid prices, allowing traders to settle profits and losses directly with a public pool.

As a result, it can offer up to 1000x leverage, with no funding rates and no slippage from traditional order book trading. Traders' positions exist in PaperTrade's smart contracts, with Hyperliquid prices read in real time at position opening and closing, and settlement based on the difference.

PaperTrade's trading costs are concentrated in a cut of profitable trades. According to the official settlement rules, profitable trades are subject to a certain percentage cut, and the smaller the price change from entry to exit, the higher the percentage deducted from profits.

PaperTrade relies on traders' losses to accumulate a capital pool. Profitable traders take profits from the pool; when the pool is insufficient to pay, unpaid profits enter a first-in, first-out queue, waiting for subsequent funds to replenish it.

The PAPER token provides incentives for this bootstrapping process.

The token starts from zero supply and is minted through qualifying real losses. According to the official issuance rules, when the LP scale recorded by the protocol is below $2 million, every $1 of qualifying losses corresponds to 100 PAPER; after exceeding this threshold, the issuance rate gradually decreases.

After obtaining PAPER, it can be staked to share in USDC profit distribution proportionally. One part comes from protocol fees, and the other part comes from excess returns after the LP scale recorded by the protocol exceeds $5 million. Profit distribution is also constrained by payment order: queued winners come first, and the protocol must first be able to pay them before distributing fees to stakers. PAPER cannot be transferred in the initial period after launch and can only be staked and unstaked.

What is worth calculating here is the cost of obtaining each PAPER.

Delphi Digital's analytical model gives an example: simultaneously open long and short positions with equal notional amounts on PaperTrade, putting in $100 margin on each side, using 100x leverage, and closing both together after BTC price moves 0.5%. One side loses $50, while the other side earns about $42.31 after deductions and fees, for a net cost of about $7.69, obtaining about 4900 PAPER, equivalent to spending about $16 for every 10,000 PAPER acquired.

But this is only an estimate under assumptions such as matched execution. The actual entry and exit prices on both sides, profit reduction, execution delays, and the capital pool's payment capacity will all affect the final acquisition cost of PAPER tokens.

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