The clearing knowledge gap

75% of all money spent in crypto/blockchain is spent on derivatives trading.

Stablecoin is about 8%.

Yet we have a huge knowledge gap.

Most people in crypto can explain execution speed, chain throughput, or TPS.

Very few can explain what happens between a derivatives trade being agreed and final settlement.

That gap is called clearing. Not settlement. Clearing. The risk management layer that manages counterparty exposure, delivers capital efficiency, and makes it possible to scale.

Almost every future, option, and a large fraction of swaps in traditional finance goes through a clearinghouse.

Crypto derivatives, for the most part, do not. Where clearing alternatives exist, they socialises losses across all participants (ADL).

That is not clearing. That is a structural problem. That prevents scaled adoption.

I put together a short explainer on what derivatives clearing does, why it matters, and why its absence is the single biggest reason institutional capital remains proportionally small and tentative. In a future post will do more on how, in the meantime ping me for the whitepaper.

Personal view is this: the next wave of market infrastructure will not be about speed. It will be about who bears the risk, and how.

This isn’t obviously competitive to the existing players, it is additive. It is the biggest missing piece of infrastructure.

This first appeared on LinkedIn on 16 March 2026. If you want to comment or discuss, that’s the place.