Some reasons why I think Deribit fended off challengers in crypto options space, by year 2018-2019: most ppl thought Bitmex would add options and kill Deribit. They ended up adding daily expiry Up contracts that were priced too high 2020-2021: bit dot com, okex, ftx, binance. Deribit won the b2b corporate market, firms like babel pushed all their flow on. 3ac pushed the long your calls with calls gamma squeeze. VCs mostly felt defi options would happen, but Ribbon and Hegic were only ones to get some adoption, and in the end the real MMs still need to clear risk on Deribit 2021-2022: VCs pushed Paradigm as an otc rfq layer that would eventually abstract out Deribit. Every cefi exch invested in Paradigm. Deribit wisely understood that this would simply bring them more flow and expand the total market space Deribit wisely resisted all my efforts to get them to launch a token, and wisely resisted efforts to list options on all alts. In the end they won by having high uptime, risk mgmt, consistent product, and professional user focus.