Most of crypto's biggest trades never touch a public order book. They happen on OTC desks, where institutions quietly enter and exit positions, and where you can see what sophisticated money is really doing. We went inside one of the largest with Wintermute's Jasper De Maere on DimeTV: the surge in altcoin options, what really happened on October 10, and where market structure goes next.
This isn't a how-to on options mechanics. If you want the foundations, our options series covers calls, puts, the Greeks, and how implied volatility is priced. This is the view from an institutional trading desk: who is buying, what they are buying, and what the plumbing of the market looks like from the inside.
Watch the full episode on DimeTV with Wintermute's Jasper De Maere, or read the highlights below.
Featured guest
Jasper De Maere, OTC trader and desk strategist at Wintermute. Wintermute is one of the world's leading algorithmic trading firms and OTC desks in digital assets, with billions in average daily volume. Jasper started in equity research and structured products at a major investment bank before moving full-time into crypto in 2021. Alongside trading, he writes Wintermute's weekly market update and blends the desk's proprietary OTC data into market strategy. He joined Paradex on DimeTV to talk institutional flow.
From the episode
An OTC desk helps institutions move size without moving the market, and its data reveals what sophisticated players are really trading.
Options demand is at an inflection: Wintermute traded roughly 3.5x more altcoin options notional this year than last.
The draw is capital efficiency and passive yield, with covered calls on high-volatility alts generating attractive returns.
On October 10, auto-deleveraging broke dealers' delta-neutral hedges and triggered a forced-selling feedback loop, the most intense part lasting under an hour.
The next frontier is onchain vaults and VTFs, packaging strategies once reserved for private-bank clients.
What does a crypto OTC desk actually do?
Picture the opposite of clicking "buy" on an exchange. When an institution needs to move serious size, doing it on a public order book would move the price against them before they finished. That is the job of an over-the-counter desk. As Jasper puts it, the OTC desk helps people enter or exit a specific position smoothly, whether on the Delta One (spot and futures) side or in options.
What makes Wintermute's approach notable is that it trades on principal, not agency. Rather than simply routing a client's order, the desk quotes a risk price, warehouses that risk on its own book, and then works out of it gradually. That structure aligns incentives: because the desk now owns the position, it is motivated to minimize market impact just as the client is. Jasper describes this alignment as something counterparties genuinely value, and it is a big reason a one-stop desk plugged into both centralized and onchain venues can offer better execution across the long tail of tokens.
Why OTC data is a window
Because so much institutional size crosses the desk, an OTC book is a uniquely clear lens on what sophisticated money is doing. Wintermute runs a granular analysis of its flow every half year to spot trends, the kind of read you cannot get from public screens alone, then blends it into market strategy.
What are institutions actually trading right now?
Spot and Delta One are still the bread and butter, Jasper says, but the standout trend is options. The desk's own data shows demand at an inflection point: this year it traded roughly three and a half times more altcoin options notional than the year before. This isn't just Bitcoin and Ethereum anymore; appetite is broadening across the major altcoins.
Two motivations drive it. The first is capital efficiency: an option can express a view with less capital tied up than holding the underlying. The second is passive yield. Rather than staking an altcoin on some less-established chain and taking on smart-contract risk, holders increasingly sell covered calls against positions they already own. With implied volatility on many alts still high, the annualized yield can be impressive. Tellingly, the buyers are not only crypto-native funds: family offices, high-net-worth managers, and traditional asset managers are dabbling in altcoin options too, and to them the underlying barely matters. They look at the volatility surface, the catalysts, and the unlocks, then choose strikes and structures accordingly.
"We traded three and a half times more notional in altcoins on the options side than we did last year. Options is finding this inflection point in adoption where it's going mainstream."
Jasper De Maere, Wintermute
Are structured products finally arriving in crypto?
Structured products have been a "next year" story in crypto for years. Jasper, who built financial products in traditional finance, thinks the pieces are finally in place. The reason is infrastructure: on-screen options volumes are now large enough that dealers can hedge their exposure on listed venues rather than improvising bespoke delta-hedging strategies. When the hedging ecosystem matures, structured products become cheaper to build, and the intrinsic value to the end client goes up.
Demand is still selective rather than insatiable, and it varies by region (Asia has long had strong structured-product appetite, with Europe and the US catching up). But Jasper's read is that as the market recovers, take rates on structured products could be meaningfully higher than before, because the underlying simple-derivatives ecosystem has matured enough to support them.
Want to trade the instruments these desks build on? Paradex offers BTC and ETH options from a single self-custodial account, with live Greeks and deep liquidity built to fill.
No conversation about recent market structure is complete without the October 10 crash, and Jasper's desk-level explanation is the clearest you will hear. The root cause was leverage: an enormous amount of it had built up in perpetual futures. When prices started to fall, liquidations began, and then a more subtle mechanic took over.
Many dealers run delta neutral, holding long spot offset by short perpetual futures so they have no directional exposure. When the centralized perp venues auto-deleveraged (ADL) positions that were deeply in profit, they forcibly closed out the very hedges dealers were relying on. Suddenly a carefully delta-neutral book was left with a naked long position into a falling market. The rush to re-hedge those positions created a powerful feedback loop of forced selling, and some assets fell 60, 70, even 80 percent. Strikingly, Jasper notes the most violent compression lasted only about 30 to 45 minutes; the lasting damage was in the liquidations, amplified by a derivatives-to-spot ratio he pegs around 20 to 25 times.
The market-structure lesson
The crash was not really about a single bad headline; it was about how forced-liquidation mechanics on highly leveraged perp venues can cascade. It is a reminder of why the design of a venue's liquidation and deleveraging logic matters, and why traders are paying closer attention to how positions get closed when markets break.
Where do onchain vaults and VTFs fit in?
One of the liveliest threads was the rise of onchain vaults, and the emerging idea of vault-traded funds (VTFs): fully onchain, composable, programmable vehicles that can wrap almost any strategy, from yield generation to looping to options overlays. Wintermute recently moved into curated vaults, leaning on its DeFi and research teams to build them in a risk-controlled way. Jasper's framing is that vaults are becoming a credible new product category alongside the structured products and tokenized assets that distributors already choose from; to win allocation, a vault simply has to be a better, safer, more rational investment than the alternatives.
The longer-term unlock is access. As Jasper and our host discussed, the structured payoffs that traditionally required millions in capital and a private-bank relationship could, through onchain vaults, become permissionless. Paradex already runs the live building block this vision needs: onchain, yield-generating vaults. Jasper even pointed to an early example, a vault that runs a delta-neutral short-volatility strategy on Bitcoin and pays an interesting yield, as a sign of where this is heading.
If crypto volatility is low, where did the traders go?
A candid theme from the conversation: in a quieter crypto market, some retail energy has rotated into equities. Jasper's explanation is structural, not sentimental. For years, crypto was uniquely the liquid asset that offered extreme volatility. Recently crypto volatility has compressed while equity-market volatility has risen, so the two profiles converged. If a trader mainly wants something volatile to trade, equities now offer that, and the underlying matters less than the movement.
Jasper is careful to say this is not retail leaving crypto forever; it is capital following volatility, amplified by reactive ETF flows that can be self-fulfilling in both directions. His read on the bigger picture is constructive: bear markets flush out leverage and weak players, and they are historically when the most durable products get built. The throughline he is most excited about is the speed at which large financial institutions are now educating themselves and moving in, which is exactly the kind of flow an OTC desk sees first.
What is the one thing to take away?
The institutional crypto market has quietly become serious infrastructure. Options demand is broadening beyond Bitcoin, structured products are finally buildable, and the painful lessons of events like October 10 are pushing the whole market toward sturdier design. The desks that see this flow first are watching capital get more selective and more sophisticated, not leave. For traders, the takeaway is that the tools institutions use, options, careful risk management, and increasingly onchain vaults, are becoming accessible to far more than just the largest players.
Frequently asked questions
A crypto over-the-counter (OTC) desk helps clients enter or exit large positions without moving the market. Unlike on-exchange order books, an OTC desk like Wintermute's quotes a price, warehouses the risk on principal, and works the position gradually using execution algorithms, which aligns the desk's incentive with minimizing the client's market impact.
According to Wintermute's Jasper De Maere, spot and Delta One remain the core, but options demand is surging. The desk has traded roughly three and a half times more altcoin options notional this year than last, driven by yield strategies like covered calls and low-delta catalyst trades from family offices, asset managers, and crypto-native funds.
Heavy leverage in perpetual futures unwound violently. As prices fell, exchanges auto-deleveraged (ADL) deeply in-the-money positions, which broke the delta-neutral hedges many dealers relied on, leaving them with unwanted directional exposure. Closing those positions created a feedback loop of forced selling. The most intense move lasted roughly 30 to 45 minutes.
Institutions increasingly use options for capital efficiency and passive yield rather than holding or staking tokens directly. With implied volatility on many altcoins still high, selling covered calls can generate attractive annualized yields, which is drawing family offices, high-net-worth managers, and traditional asset managers into altcoin options.
A vault-traded fund is an emerging, crypto-native idea: an onchain vault that runs a defined strategy, such as selling volatility or generating yield, and is composable and potentially permissionless. Wintermute and others have moved into curated vaults, with the longer-term vision of packaging structured-product payoffs that were once reserved for large private-bank clients.
About DimeTV
DimeTV is the media channel of Paradex, where the operators, traders, and builders shaping crypto's market structure share what they're seeing. This episode features Jasper De Maere, OTC trader and desk strategist at Wintermute. Thanks to Jasper for joining us. Follow DimeTV on X for new episodes.
This content is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial, investment, or trading advice. Trading options, perpetuals, and other crypto derivatives involves substantial risk, including the loss of premiums paid and, on sold positions, losses beyond the premium received. Leverage can amplify losses, including the rapid and total loss of capital during volatile events. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Do your own research before trading.
References to vaults, vault-traded funds, and structured products describe an emerging and evolving market, including features that may be on a roadmap rather than currently available. Availability of products varies and some may not be live. Access to Paradex may be restricted in certain jurisdictions. Verify your local regulations before using the platform.
Quotes are drawn from the DimeTV episode and have been lightly edited for clarity and length.
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