Paradex sees options open interest surge 2.6x to $202M after RFQ launch

Paradex just pulled off something that most decentralized exchanges only put in pitch decks: it made institutional-grade options trading work on-chain, and the numbers moved fast enough to notice. After integrating Paradigm’s request-for-quote (RFQ) engine in mid-September 2026, the platform watched its options open interest climb 2.6x to $202 million. Daily notional trading volumes hit as high as $17.6 million in the first days after the public launch. What RFQ actually changes For anyone unfamiliar, RFQ is essentially a system where traders request a price quote from market makers for a specific trade before executing it. Think of it as the difference between shouting your order into a crowded room versus quietly asking a dealer for their best price on exactly what you want. In practice, this matters most for complex trades. The Paradigm integration lets Paradex users execute multi-leg options strategies and private block trades, capabilities that have historically been the exclusive territory of centralized platforms like Deribit. Multi-leg strategies, things like straddles, strangles, and spreads, require executing multiple options contracts simultaneously. Without an RFQ syste...