The Bybit Perp Options launch, scheduled for 17 September at 8pm UTC, will give traders options contracts on SpaceX (SPCX) and Nvidia (NVDA), but the underlying of those options is not the shares themselves. It is Bybit’s own perpetual futures contracts, making this a derivative built on top of another derivative, with no equity anywhere in the chain.
A Derivative Built on a Derivative
Bybit’s perpetual futures (perpetuals, meaning contracts with no expiry date that track an asset’s price continuously) for SPCX and NVDA, known internally as SPCXUSDT and NVDAUSDT, already exist on the platform. The new Perp Options take those perpetuals as their reference point. An option buyer is therefore gaining exposure to a synthetic instrument that mirrors the stock price, with no route to the actual shares at any point in the structure.
Bybit’s announcement calls the product ‘an industry first.’ The contracts settle in USDT (Tether’s dollar-pegged stablecoin), trade around the clock, offer fractional lot sizes, and allow portfolio margin (where your overall account acts as collateral rather than each position being margined separately) inside Bybit’s Unified Trading Account. Tesla, the Nvidia-heavy Invesco QQQ ETF, SOXL and Micron are listed as the next names to be added.
What Bybit has not published are the contract specifications, settlement methodology, margin requirements, or jurisdictional restrictions for Perp Options, beyond the marketing details in its launch announcement.
Bybit Perp Options Launch Into a Market Already Covered by Regulated Contracts
Both underlying names already have exchange-listed options available in regulated US markets. SpaceX completed its Nasdaq IPO on 12 June, priced at $135.00 per share across 555,555,555 Class A shares, raising what has been reported as $75 billion, described as the largest IPO in history, according to SpaceXChart. The stock closed its first day at $161.11, a gain of 19.3%, and reached an all-time high of $225.64 on 16 June before correcting approximately 35% to an all-time low of $145.20 on 8 July. Standard, exchange-listed options on SPCX began trading four days after the IPO. Nvidia options have traded on US exchanges for years.
SPCX was added to the Nasdaq-100 index on 7 July 2026, according to SpaceXChart, giving it a presence in major index products that retail investors often access through tracker funds and ETFs.
Bybit’s version offers what the regulated market does not: weekend and overnight trading, fractional sizing, and access without a US brokerage account. The trade-off is that Bybit’s Perp Options sit entirely outside the clearing and settlement infrastructure that governs exchange-listed contracts. There is no central counterparty guarantee, no delivery mechanism, and no claim on the underlying equity at any point.
Part of a Broader Race Into Synthetic Equity
Bybit launched the SPCXUSDT perpetual in May, marketed at the time as pre-IPO exposure to SpaceX ahead of its listing. Since then, it has listed perpetuals tracking consumer-staples and utilities ETFs, McDonald’s and Shein, among others. The pattern reflects a wider industry shift.
Synthetic and tokenised equity-perpetual trading volumes rose from roughly $85 billion in January to approximately $470 billion in June, according to The Block. SpaceX was the most-traded single name in June at more than $66 billion. Coinbase, Kraken and Robinhood have all moved toward 24-hour equity access in some form over the same period.
For UK retail investors, access to this kind of product carries layers of risk that are absent from regulated options: counterparty exposure to Bybit itself, no Financial Conduct Authority oversight, settlement in a stablecoin rather than fiat currency, and a structure where a sharp move in the perpetual’s funding rate (the periodic payment that keeps a perpetual’s price close to the spot price) can affect the option’s cost independently of what NVDA or SPCX shares are doing.
The more immediate question for traders watching the Bybit Perp Options launch is whether the contract specs, once published, reflect a fair pricing model. Without the clearing-house infrastructure that sits behind regulated options, the burden of scrutiny falls on the user rather than the regulator.
