Need evidence of just how popular traditional assets have become with the crypto crowd?
Look no further than Binance, the world’s largest digital asset exchange by volume. After seeing billions of dollars in trading on perpetual futures tied to gold and silver, the exchange on Wednesday rolled out options on the same two metals.
These options are going live today through Nest Exchange Limited, the company’s Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM)-regulated exchange. They build directly on the strong demand for Binance’s gold and silver perpetual futures, which have been available to trade on the exchange since January.
“We’ve seen strong demand for our commodity perpetuals since introducing them earlier this year, and commodity options build on that momentum. With gold hitting record highs and investors seeking inflation hedges outside traditional equities, Binance’s commodity options offer users additional compliant, crypto-native ways to diversify without leaving the platform,” Shunyet Jan, head of exchange and trading at Binance, said in an email.
Options are derivative contracts used by traders to hedge price volatility risks. A call option offers asymmetric upside exposure in the underlying asset for a small upfront payment, much like a lottery ticket. A put option represents an insurance against price drops.
Exchanges typically follow a playbook when offering derivatives as a product. They start with futures to build a deep, liquid order book and tight spreads, and only once that core market is humming do they layer on options as a second wave of more complex, higher‑margin products.
A Binance representative shared volume figures for gold and silver perpetual futures that underscore their popularity. Gold perpetuals, according to the representative, have hit a peak daily volume of $7.77 billion, while silver perpetuals reached $7.27 billion. These peaks represented roughly 3–8% of COMEX gold volume and 9–20% of COMEX silver volume at that time.
“The volume growth suggests that when access to traditional market exposure becomes simpler and more integrated, user participation can ramp up quickly,” the representative said. “Liquidity can become relevant quickly.”
The new options are European-style and settled in USDT. The contracts reference a weighted average of prices drawn from multiple independent third-party data vendors that report the traditional gold and silver markets. This approach produces a robust, market-representative benchmark that does not rely on any single venue or token, according to Binance.