The most popular cryptocurrency options exchange, Deribit, is suffering a severe service outage.
- According to company tweets early on Thursday, the trading platform is suffering "hardware issues" and a technician has been called to reboot its servers and (hopefully) bring services back to normal functionality.
- "We are not hacked and your funds are safe," an initial tweet stated.
- Deribit went on to warn that it may not have its systems back online in time for today's daily options expiry.
- In that case, the firm will "manually adjust the options expiry to reflect the actual market at the time of expiry."
- The value used for the adjustment would be drawn from Deribit's index as listed on test.deribit.com.
- However, the outage may knock confidence in the exchange with the news that Deribit doesn't seem to have server redundancy to avoid such severe ramifications from technical issues.
- Similar issues have affected top U.S. spot exchange COINBASE in the past, leading it to eventually pledge to do more in terms of redundancy provision.
- Deribit may, in fact, have been lucky the outage didn't occur Friday, when over $700 million-worth of monthly contracts are set to expire, most of them on Deribit.
- Today's daily bitcoin option expiry is worth $22.8 million, alongside $6.5 million in ether options.
- Deribit is by far the most popular options exchange in the crypto space in terms of trading volumes:
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