Rocket lists a full Bitcoin options chain — calls and puts across a ladder of strikes and expiries — on a fully onchain order book with self-custody throughout.
What makes it different is how orders match. Rocket does not run a continuous, first-come-first-served book. Every block is a micro auction that clears at one fair price for everyone in it, so no trader can win by being faster than another.
Almost every exchange, onchain or off, matches orders continuously and in time order. That design pays whoever arrives first, which is why firms spend fortunes on colocation, microwave towers and priority gas — none of which gets anyone a better price. Rocket replaces it. Each block on the Rocket chain is an independent auction lasting roughly 100 milliseconds. Orders that arrive during the block are treated as simultaneous, aggregate supply and demand are constructed at block close, and a single uniform clearing price is chosen to maximise the volume that can trade.
Because there is no first order inside a block, there is nothing to front-run. Latency arbitrage and the usual MEV games have no surface to attack. The only things that decide whether you trade, and at what price, are the price and size you were willing to show. Every filled order executes at its limit price or better, and marketable buy and sell orders can clear against each other inside the spread rather than each paying it.
It still feels instant. Blocks are short enough that placing an order and seeing a fill is indistinguishable from a continuous book — the difference is that the incentives underneath reward better pricing instead of faster wires.
Options books are where continuous matching hurts most. An options market maker quoting a ladder of strikes and expiries is exposed at every one of them, and when spot jumps, a fast taker can pick off whichever quotes went stale before the maker can pull them. Makers defend themselves the only way they can: by widening spreads and showing less size. Traders then pay that defensive padding on every contract they touch.
Auction matching damps that. When fair value moves, new orders join the same batch and the clearing price moves with it, so a stale quote is cushioned rather than sniped at the old price. A maker who is not being picked off can afford to quote tighter and deeper, and pro-rata allocation at the margin makes it rational to display real size instead of hiding it. The result is a BTC chain where the spread you see is closer to genuine fair value.
Each contract shows its mark price, bid and ask, open interest and Greeks, so you can judge how a position responds to a move in spot, a shift in implied volatility, or the passage of time before committing. Selecting one or more strikes plots the combined payoff at expiry, with break-evens and maximum loss, which makes multi-leg structures such as spreads, straddles and covered calls straightforward to size.
Trading happens from your own wallet. Collateral is margined and settled by the protocol onchain, so nothing is ever deposited into an operator-controlled account the way a centralised options venue requires.
A BTC perpetual gives linear exposure that moves roughly one-for-one with price and carries liquidation risk. An option gives the right, not the obligation, to buy or sell at a strike before expiry, so buying one caps your loss at the premium paid. That asymmetry is what makes options the better tool for hedging a Bitcoin position, earning premium against one, or trading volatility itself rather than direction. For straightforward leveraged direction, the perpetual is simpler and usually cheaper.
Connect a self-custody wallet and open the BTC options chain. Pick an expiry, choose a strike on the call or put side, then review the premium, break-even and payoff before submitting. Your order joins the current block's auction and, if it clears, fills at your limit price or better. Collateral stays in your control and settlement happens onchain.
Every block on Rocket is a short auction, roughly 100 milliseconds long. Orders arriving during the block are treated as simultaneous rather than queued in time order. At block close the protocol builds aggregate supply and demand, picks the single clearing price that maximises tradable volume, and fills all eligible orders at that same price, allocating pro-rata at the margin. No order has priority for arriving earlier.
No. Front-running requires a first transaction to get ahead of, and inside an auction block there is no first — every order in the block clears together at one price. That removes the latency arbitrage and transaction-reordering MEV that continuous order books and most onchain venues expose traders to.
Not on Rocket. Because there is no time priority within a block, speed does not improve your fill. Competition happens on price and size only, so a trader with a microsecond edge and a trader on a home connection are treated identically within the same auction window.
You will get your limit price or better, never worse. The uniform clearing price is the same for everyone in that auction, so when buy and sell interest overlaps the clearing happens inside the spread — buyers pay less than their limit and sellers receive more than theirs. That surplus stays with the traders rather than going to intermediaries.
Not on perpetuals. Rocket charges a flat maker and taker fee across every volume tier, so a first-time trader pays the same rate as the largest desk on the platform. Funding payments are exchanged peer-to-peer between traders with no cut taken by the protocol.
The BTC chain lists calls and puts across a ladder of strikes around spot, spanning short-dated contracts through to longer-dated expiries. It updates live, so what you see reflects what is currently quoted rather than a fixed schedule.
No. You trade from your own wallet and the protocol margins and settles positions onchain, so you keep control of your keys and collateral throughout. This is the structural difference from a centralised options venue, where you must deposit into the exchange's own wallets before you can trade at all.
Collateral is USDC. Deposit directly from Arbitrum, or from Ethereum or Base through rhino.fi on desktop. The same balance margins perps, options and vault deposits.