Every new options platform builds its own clearing

Stark.

That is the reaction I had at a Chatham House rules conference this week. The number of new options platforms for crypto. The banks wanting them built so that they can access them. The trading houses complaining about overstretched capital to meet trading demand.

Every new platform having to build or internalize its own clearing because no independent layer exists. That is a cost they should not have to carry and a risk their customers should not have to accept.

When exchange, clearing, and custody sit under one roof, counterparty exposure concentrates in ways clients cannot independently assess.

47% of institutional participants already cite counterparty risk as their primary concern.

The risk models that are easiest to implement don’t help. SPAN was designed for daily batch cycles on stable underlyings. Crypto is 24/7 and an order of magnitude more volatile.

Worse under Basel III, banks face punitive capital charges on anything cleared through less than a QCCP. No vertically integrated exchange will get there. A DCO license is a starting point not an end. Without it, banks cannot participate at scale, and we all want that capital in the market.

The infrastructure gap is widening, not closing.

The carousel walks through the full picture.

We need an independent clearing layer, QCCP qualified, a horizontal service to bring capital efficiency to many markets, to unlock tokenised collateral.

#CryptoDerivatives #Clearing #InstitutionalCrypto

This first appeared on LinkedIn on 27 March 2026. If you want to comment or discuss, that’s the place.