Crypto is bleeding while AI stocks print new highs every week. Is the cycle over, or is something else going on? We put that question to a trader who sits in the middle of institutional flow: Cumberland's Requir van der Merwe, on DimeTV. His answer is that this is a liquidity rotation, not a funeral, and the same plumbing that is draining crypto today is what brings it back.
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 macro and market-structure view from a trading desk: where the liquidity went, how Bitcoin's volatility behaviour has flipped, and what is coming next for agents, vaults, and regulated venues.
Watch the full episode on DimeTV with Cumberland's Requir van der Merwe, or read the highlights below.
Featured guest
Requir van der Merwe, [[REQUIR-TITLE]] at Cumberland, the digital-asset arm of DRW. Requir works on the options side of the desk and previously traded options at Galaxy, giving him a front-row seat across the cycle, from the 2021 peak through the Luna and FTX blowups to today. A former Stanford wrestling captain who grew up in South Africa, he brings a competitor's read to market structure. He joined Paradex on DimeTV to talk liquidity, volatility, and where the market goes next.
From the episode
Crypto's weakness is a liquidity rotation, not a crypto-specific failure. Capital is flowing into the AI and infrastructure buildout, and crypto is being used as a funding source.
As the most liquid global risk asset, crypto reprices a tightening regime first, before metals and equities follow.
Bitcoin's options regime has flipped to equity-like: spot-down vol-up, spot-up vol-down, as the market institutionalized.
A third trader type is arriving: AI agents you instruct in plain language, lowering the barrier to sophisticated options trades.
Vaults have become powerful enough to run real strategies, drawing institutional allocators who want flexibility without hedge-fund overhead.
Why is crypto down while AI stocks are up?
It is the question on every crypto holder's mind: equities and AI names are at or near record highs, and crypto is the one asset going the other way. Requir's framing is that this is not crypto breaking, it is capital rotating. Crypto does best in regimes of abundant liquidity, low rates, and money being pushed into the system. Right now the opposite is happening. A huge amount of capital is being absorbed by the real-world buildout behind artificial intelligence: data centres, power, hardware, and a wave of very large technology listings pulling money toward them.
In that environment, crypto becomes a convenient source of funds. It is liquid, it trades around the clock, and it is easy to sell to free up capital for the trade everyone wants to be in. That is why, on his read, crypto has underperformed even as the broader market climbs. The clearest illustration is the behaviour of holders trimming crypto to chase the assets doing ten percent a day, and even some Bitcoin miners selling coin to fund infrastructure for the AI build.
Why crypto moves first
Because crypto is the most honest, most globally traded liquidity instrument, it tends to price in a tightening regime before anything else. Requir's pattern from past episodes of stress: crypto moves first, then metals like gold and silver start to wobble, then equities come lower across the board. If that holds, crypto weakness is less a crypto story and more an early warning about liquidity everywhere.
Is the crypto bull market over?
Requir's answer is no, and his reasoning is structural rather than hopeful. Bear phases are when leverage gets flushed and weaker players exit, and historically they are when the most durable infrastructure gets built. He points to the steady institutional progress happening underneath weak token prices: banks moving toward crypto on the balance sheet and Bitcoin-backed lending, and the largest payment companies building on stablecoin rails.
There is real frustration in the market that adoption and friendlier regulation have arrived without token prices following, and he acknowledges it directly. His view is that this is a timing gap, not a broken thesis: the productive use of these networks for moving value globally takes time to show up in price, and the liquidity that powers the next leg returns when rates ease and money flows back into the system. In the meantime, capital concentrates in the highest-conviction, highest-quality assets.
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.
How Bitcoin's volatility regime flipped to look like equities
This is the part most useful to options traders. For years, Bitcoin lived in a spot-up vol-up regime: as price rose, implied volatility rose with it, because flows were overwhelmingly retail chasing upside. Requir describes the old world vividly, with traders paying up for far-out-of-the-money calls and one-year options at extreme volatility levels, on the assumption there was no ceiling to how high things could go.
That has flipped. As the market institutionalized and overwriting (selling covered calls for yield) became a dominant flow, Bitcoin started behaving like equities have for decades: spot-up vol-down, spot-down vol-up. Volatility now tends to rise on selloffs as hedging demand appears, and fall on rallies. Knowing which regime you are in is not academic, it tells you whether your options are likely to get more or less expensive as the underlying moves, which changes how you structure a trade.
The equity-market mirror
Requir notes the irony that just as Bitcoin took on equities' volatility behaviour, equities took on crypto's: with retail piling into very short-dated options, a large share of US options activity is now in contracts expiring within a day. Both markets are increasingly shaped by where the options flow sits, not just the spot.
What are market makers seeing in crypto options flow?
From the desk, the most recent stretch of weakness had a revealing signature. On the first move lower, the volatility surface was strikingly quiet, with implied vols near the lows of the year even as crypto underperformed a rising equity market. That complacency, Requir says, was the real alert: crypto was no longer just drifting, it was decoupling to the downside while everything else rose.
Then the surface finally woke up, with a wave of downside buying. A meaningful share of it looked like large portfolios using crypto as the weakest asset to hedge broader risk, rather than people protecting crypto books specifically. He also flags a structural shift in his own flow: a growing share now comes from structured products, with private banks and family offices more active, exactly the kind of client that turns up in size during a big volatility event because that is the best moment to sell yield-bearing structures.
What is agentic trading, and is it the future?
One of the most forward-looking threads was about who, or what, is going to be trading. Today the market is essentially two groups: retail and institutions. Requir and our host discussed an emerging third category: agents. The idea is that instead of wrestling with an order builder or a wall of strikes, you describe your view to an AI agent in plain language, ask what to do, and then instruct it to build and run the strategy for you.
The practical effect is that complex options trades become far more accessible, and, by making execution easier, agents can push more liquidity through the market. This is squarely the thesis behind what Paradex is building: a trading experience where you can express a view and act on it without needing to be a derivatives specialist. As Requir put it, anything that makes trading easier and more competitive ultimately moves more liquidity back and forth, which is good for everyone in the market.
The Paradex angle: across the industry, venues are racing to connect their order flow to AI agents. The direction of travel is clear, sophisticated strategies, expressed in plain language and executed programmatically, becoming available to far more than just the largest desks.
Why are institutions interested in crypto vaults?
If agents are how trades get expressed, vaults are increasingly how capital gets allocated. Requir has watched vaults evolve from a simple idea into vehicles powerful enough to run genuinely sophisticated strategies. The appeal for allocators is operational flexibility: rather than the paperwork and overhead of a hedge-fund allocation, you can deposit into a vault with clear, programmatic risk limits and known strategy parameters.
He describes meeting larger institutional allocators who are actively studying how to use vaults to streamline how they deploy capital, alongside the crypto-native firms that have pushed into them recently. Paradex already runs the live building block this points toward: onchain, yield-generating vaults that package a defined strategy into something an allocator can simply deposit into. As the tooling matures, the structured payoffs that once required a private-bank relationship move within reach of far more participants.
What does regulated perpetual futures approval mean?
A genuine structural milestone landed recently: in late May 2026, US regulators approved the first Bitcoin perpetual futures contract on a regulated US exchange, bringing onshore a product that had lived almost entirely offshore. Requir's view is that this should have happened long ago, and that it is unambiguously positive for adoption.
His reasoning: perpetuals are a better instrument for expressing leveraged interest than fixed-expiry futures, and a regulated onshore venue grows the entire pie. More perpetual activity tends to bring more options activity on top of it, and it pulls institutions into trading crypto derivatives on a 24-hour basis within a framework they are comfortable with. For a market that has spent years watching liquidity sit offshore, onshoring the most actively traded derivative is a meaningful step.
What is the one thing to take away?
Crypto's underperformance is a story about where liquidity is, not about whether crypto works. Capital has rotated toward the AI buildout, and crypto, being the most liquid and honest risk asset, felt it first. Underneath the weak prices, the market is quietly maturing: Bitcoin now trades with an equity-like volatility profile, agents and vaults are lowering the barriers to sophisticated strategies, and the most actively traded derivative is coming onshore. For traders, the takeaway from a desk that sees the flow is that the tools are getting better and more accessible precisely when attention is elsewhere, which is historically when the groundwork for the next move gets laid.
Frequently asked questions
According to Cumberland's Requir van der Merwe, it is largely a liquidity rotation rather than a crypto-specific failure. Crypto performs best when liquidity is abundant and rates are easing. With capital rotating into the AI and infrastructure buildout, and several large technology listings drawing money in, crypto has been used as an easy funding source. As the most liquid and globally traded risk asset, it tends to reprice a tightening liquidity regime first, before metals and equities follow.
It describes how implied volatility moves relative to price. For years Bitcoin behaved spot-up vol-up: prices and volatility rose together as retail chased upside. As the market institutionalized and overwriting (covered-call selling) grew, Bitcoin flipped toward the equity-like pattern of spot-up vol-down and spot-down vol-up, where volatility rises on selloffs as hedging demand appears and falls on rallies. Understanding which regime you are in tells you whether options are likely to get more or less expensive as price moves.
Agentic trading is a third category of market participant emerging alongside retail and institutions: AI agents that can be instructed in plain language. Instead of navigating an order builder, a trader can describe a view, such as expecting volatility to rise, and have the agent propose and then execute a structured strategy. It lowers the skill barrier to complex options trades and, by making execution easier, can add liquidity to the market.
A crypto vault is an onchain vehicle that runs a defined strategy, such as selling volatility or generating yield, that allocators can deposit into directly. The appeal is operational flexibility: instead of the paperwork and overhead of a hedge fund allocation, capital can be committed to a vault with clear, programmatic risk limits. Vaults have become powerful enough to run sophisticated strategies, which is drawing both crypto-native firms and larger institutional allocators.
Yes. In late May 2026, US regulators approved the first Bitcoin perpetual futures contract listed on a regulated US exchange, bringing onshore a product that had traded almost entirely offshore. The expectation among market participants is that this grows the overall market, increasing both perpetual and options activity and pulling more institutions into 24-hour crypto derivatives within a regulated framework.
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 Requir van der Merwe, [[REQUIR-TITLE]] at Cumberland. Thanks to Requir 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. The views expressed are those of the guest and do not necessarily reflect those of Paradex. 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, agentic trading, 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 and paraphrased remarks are drawn from the DimeTV episode and have been lightly edited for clarity and length.
.svg)
