A strange thing has happened to Bitcoin's derivatives market over the past five years. The market is larger, institutions play a much bigger role, exchanges offer more sophisticated products, and traders have become far better at moving risk around. At the same time, one of the products that helped build that market has almost disappeared from the crypto-native venues where Bitcoin derivatives first took off.

Dated futures volume across the offshore venues tracked by Glassnode is now about 97% below its 2021 level. Options, meanwhile, have expanded from roughly one-quarter of crypto-native Bitcoin derivatives open interest to nearly half, gaining share during four of the five market regimes Glassnode studied since 2019.

It would be easy to describe that as options replacing futures, but that's not really what happened. Bitcoin derivatives have split the old futures market between two products that are better suited to different kinds of risk, with perpetuals becoming the easiest way to make a leveraged directional bet without worrying about expiry, while options take more of the work around hedging, volatility, downside protection, and trades built around a particular price or date.

That division has squeezed dated futures between them.

CryptoSlate has been watching the process for years. A 2024 market report on how Bitcoin options affect the crypto market looked at how large expiries were already rearranging open interest and influencing short-term trading. By March 2025, Bitcoin's options-to-futures open interest ratio had climbed from 57.8% to 69.6% in less than a week, while Ether's stayed much lower, according to CryptoSlate's options-to-futures analysis .

The ratio finally flipped in January 2026, when Bitcoin options open interest reached about $74.1 billion against roughly $65.22 billion in futures, the first time CryptoSlate recorded options carrying the larger position inventory. CryptoSlate's January derivatives report captured the shift as it happened.

The new Glassnode data adds something those snapshots couldn't because it shows the reordering across several market cycles and, more importantly, makes it easier to see where the old futures activity went.

Conventional futures have a date attached to them. Buy a December Bitcoin future and the contract eventually expires, which means the trader has to settle it, close it, or roll the position into another maturity.