In August this year Coinbase, which operates the U.S.-listed cryptocurrency exchange, said it was rolling out a new matching engine for derivatives. This comes one year after Coinbase completed its acquisition of Deribit, the crypto options exchange, in August 2025.

The rollout brings Deribit onto the same core execution infrastructure as Coinbase International Exchange.

Luuk Strijers, head of international derivatives at Coinbase, said in an email to Markets Media: “Combining a new matching engine based on existing best-in-class Coinbase tech with Deribit’s advanced margining model and risk calculations has given our users the benefit of a unified, world-class derivatives platform with deeper liquidity, faster execution, a stronger risk framework, and new products like options.”

The new matching engine can process more than 100,000 orders per second with sub-millisecond matching latency. Strijers said options markets are unusually demanding on matching infrastructure because a single bitcoin expiry can span dozens of active strikes, multiplied across expiries and multi-leg strategies that market makers quote continuously. Therefore, handling that volume at consistent, sub-100 microsecond latency puts this engine in the same performance class as the infrastructure benchmarks set by the most advanced electronic options markets in traditional finance.

The new engine also introduces a built-in speed bump on selected instruments. Strijers said speed bumps are not new to markets generally, but the consequences for Deribit are “unique.” He added: “By introducing the speed bump across nearly all derivatives we protect our liquidity by our change to a low-latency architecture. By reducing adverse selection, we expect bid-ask spreads to tighten and order sizes to increase.”

Later this year, all Coinbase perpetual futures will also run on the engine. The firm is working towards cross-margining across Deribit and the rest of Coinbase’s platform in the near future, according to Strijers. Earlier this year Coinbase Prime announced integrated, regulated futures with unified cross-margin, so that institutional clients can hold one pool of collateral across spot and U.S. futures instead of margining them separately. Deribit offers its own margin flexibility that lets traders choose how collateral and risk are managed within Deribit’s books.

Competition

Coinbase faces competition in crypto derivatives from other crypto-native firms. For example, in July this year Kraken launched options outside Europe and the U.S. and the crypto exchange is aiming to expand into Europe.

Strijers said Coinbase is the most comprehensively regulated crypto platform in the UK market. He argued that obtaining a regulatory MiFID license fundamentally changed what Coinbase can offer UK investors, including launching derivatives. From this month, eligible UK professionals can access perpetuals across 170+ assets spanning equities, commodities, options, FX, dated futures and crypto options.

“Global crypto derivatives already trade at more than four times the value of spot markets, yet professional traders haven’t had access to a single, compliant platform that brings all product types together across asset classes,” said Strijers. “That’s the gap we’re closing.”

Coinbase also faces competition from traditional firms who have launched crypto derivatives. Striijers said cooperation between crypto exchanges and incumbents is not only possible, but already happening.

“The UK government and the FCA are building a forward-thinking, pro-growth framework for digital finance,” he added. “Clear, robust guardrails are what give mainstream institutions the confidence to participate.”

He also highlighted that Coinbase is already providing the custody and operational infrastructure behind many of the world’s most recognisable institutions’ entry into crypto, such as BlackRock’s iShares bitcoin exchange-traded product. Strijers expects there to be a mix of partnership and competition as incumbents bring scale and familiarity, while crypto-native firms bring infrastructure and expertise.

“That’s really the bridge between TradFi (traditional finance) and the onchain economy, and the basis of our Everything Exchange vision,” he said. “We’re building a single, regulated platform where any investor can manage all their assets in one place.”

Coinbase has a strategy of creating the ‘Everything Exchange’ where both retail and institutional users can easily access stocks, stablecoins, savings and other key financial products on a single platform, and Strijers said progress has been “incredible.”

Strijers said Coinbase is launching a string of new products across the UK and EU that will offer retail traders the same tools and infrastructure as traditional institutions

Wei Liao, director of derivatives market intelligence at Cboe Global Markets, said in a report that between 2024 and early 2026, the crypto market has been through a structural transformation. Liao said in the report: “What had functioned as a retail-led and speculative market became more institutional in ownership, more intermediated in trading, and more closely integrated with traditional financial infrastructure.”

The report, Beyond ETFs: How Derivatives & Tokenization Are Reshaping Crypto, said that by May this year, total crypto market capitalization had fallen roughly 40% below its October 2025 peak to about $2.49 trillion. However, Liao argued that this was different from prior cycles because of support from deeper institutional participation, more developed derivatives markets, broader ETF adoption, and a larger base of stablecoin liquidity.

In the options market, Liao said Deribit remains the leading crypto-native venue for non-ETF options volume, reflecting its long-standing role as a primary offshore options liquidity hub.

In Coinbase’s second quarter 2026 earnings presentation, co-founder and chief executive Brian Armstrong said crypto derivatives volume was flat despite the market being down 12%. Armstrong said: “This means that we grew share, which is great. And we got CFTC no-action relief to bring U.S. customers into the global perpetual futures liquidity pool.”

Brokers

In July this year Marex said in a statement that it has joined Deribit as a broker, to expand its institutional digital assets offering and enhance client access to global crypto derivatives markets.

Jonathan Issan, co-head of crypto trading at Marex, said in a statement: “This partnership reflects Marex’s commitment to bridging traditional finance and crypto markets, bringing our deep liquidity expertise and agency execution model to a broader client base.”

Strijers added that as digital assets become part of the global financial ecosystem, access to institutional-grade risk management tools is vital for investors. He described Marex as a “fantastic” example of the interest Deribit is seeing from institutions in adopting crypto derivatives.

“It’s reflective of a much broader shift: finance is moving onchain, and the line between crypto and tradFi is disappearing,” Strijers said. “As it does, we will see more brokers moving into the space as institutional demand continues to grow.”

As a result, Coinbase’s strategy reflects that hybrid model, and the firm expects to work with more institutional partners that want to access the crypto-economy safely and compliantly.

Integration

In August this year Deribit received a broker-dealer licence from Dubai’s Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority (VARA). The licence allows Deribit to enhance its spot trading offering, with Coinbase Exchange serving as a key liquidity provider, giving Deribit clients access to significantly deeper liquidity and hundreds of new assets.  Strijers said the Dubai license and the new matching engine show “great progress” in integrating Deribit into Coinbase’s core infrastructure.

The full transition will take place in September, when all existing Coinbase International Exchange perpetuals volume and liquidity will merge completely into Deribit. For most Coinbase app and website users, this transition will happen automatically in the background ac according to Strijers, and accounts, positions, and balances will migrate across seamlessly, with only a brief downtime period.

“Afterwards, we will start rolling out crypto options to eligible traders directly on the Coinbase app, bringing the full breadth of Deribit’s derivatives suite together with Coinbase’s infrastructure on one platform,” he added.

Deribit is already available to all U.S. Coinbase institutional clients, and the next milestone is bringing crypto options to the U.S. market, according to Strijers. Coinbase is expecting to roll these out to eligible Coinbase Prime clients in the coming months, starting with options on assets like bitcoin and ether.

U.S. clients will be able to access these products through Coinbase Financial Markets with no separate venue onboarding required. Strijers added: “Institutions will be able to trade crypto options within the regulated Coinbase environment they already use and trust, seamlessly and compliantly.”