Derive 2025: Triple Threat

January 11th, 2025

This blog will cover the following:

Derive’s Journey and Mission
AI-Powered Trading: Derive Pro
dUSD: Accessible, Sustainable Yield
Market Maker Vaults and Tooling
The Road Ahead

Introduction - Easy Finance and 2024 Recap

Derive exists to make wealth creation easy. In a world where capital—dollars and assets—is inherently fungible, we enable people to achieve their financial goals based purely on risk appetite and savings, leveraging global, low-cost rails. Our mission is to strip away unnecessary financial jargon and complexity, leaving users with just two core decisions: risk and reward.

Four years ago, I left one of the best jobs in finance because I believed then, as I do now, that the only way to build truly disruptive financial technology is onchain. I have hit the wall so many times on this journey and I want to thank the community that has endured such pain and hardship of being a believer in Derive. I am grateful for your support when we needed to rebuild so much. I also want to thank the team for pushing through what was a desert of attention, doubt and fud.

I confess, in 2023 - Derive wasn’t working, we weren’t scaling. So we threw it all away and rebuilt the protocol from the ground up.

This led to 2024, a year where we scaled volumes, revenue, and TVL to levels 30x bigger than 2023:

$8.5 Billion in notional volume ($2.3 billion in December)
$120 Million in TVL: A 24x increase since January
Over 60% market share in onchain options
Surpassed $9M annual revenue run rate in December
75,000+ users

These milestones were hit alongside a slew of major product upgrades:

Portfolio Margin and Cross Margin: Providing more efficient capital usage for traders.
Integrated RFQ: Streamlining large trades for traders and institutions.
Structured Product Vaults: Making advanced strategies accessible to all.
Lyra to Derive Rebrand: A clearer mission, a bigger vision.
Native Borrow/Lend and Spot Markets: Completing the full stack for seamless UX.
20+ Alt Perp Launches: With many more to come.

In 2024, we built the liquidity and infrastructure, shipped product, and established our position.

In 2025, we’re scaling our infinite payoff factory to deliver breakthrough products that simplify trading and market-making.

Simpler UX, delta neutral yield and more liquidity with tighter spreads will create a trifecta of growth.

Derive 2025 Roadmap: AI, dUSD, tighter liquidity and spreads

The onchain market in 2025 breaks down into 3 profiles:

Active Traders – People who trade assets or derivatives, using their market views to capture opportunities.
Yield Farmers – Users looking to earn yield while keeping exposure and managing downside risk.
Liquidity Providers – Those who earn yield by taking risk and boosting market liquidity.

We are building 1 killer product for each of these users in 2025.

1. Active Trader -> Simpler UX with AI-powered trading on Derive Pro

In Q1 we will be launching Derive Pro - the DeFAI trading platform. In collaboration with Messari, we’re redesigning the trading experience from scratch, with agents at the center. Derive Pro gives every crypto trader an intelligent copilot that simplifies and streamlines the entire trading experience. Put simply: we’re creating an army of superhuman traders.

The future is even more exciting, the models we’re training today will unlock autonomous trading agents capable of executing complex strategies on your behalf. This will redefine what’s possible in crypto trading and unleash products the world has never seen before.

Derive Pro uses large language models to enhance 3 parts of the trading flow: Research, Execution and Portfolio management.

1. Research

Every trade starts with an article, a chart, an idea. We’re collaborating with Messari to integrate their inference API into our agents to equip them with best in class crypto intelligence. Traders will be able to pull the latest news, market trends and market data in real-time via simple prompts, harnessing Messari’s powerful research and analytics platform under the hood.

2. Execution

Second, Derive has built a custom model to translate market views into trades. Users can prompt things like “I expect a market downturn after the inauguration” and receive a list of potential trades to express that view, such as “Buy BTC puts”.

We believe this will be especially powerful for options, an instrument that can express market views with high precision. Our model also prepares transactions for users and leverages smart contract wallets to make trades one-click, gasless and chainless.

The app will support spot, perps and options trading on Derive, and will also plug in to spot AMMs on L2s like Optimism, Arbitrum and Base.

3. Portfolio management

Lastly, we are reimagining the trading interface with AI at the center. We know every trader is different, and we believe in deep customization as a design principle for pro traders.

The Derive interface will be a dynamic canvas that traders can prompt and populate to suit their own styles and preferences. Traders will be able to view markets, manage open positions and place orders via familiar interfaces on desktop or via fast text prompts on mobile.

Coming Q1

The core contributors have been quietly working on this next generation exchange since October, with a launch date slated for Q1 to kick off our 2025 roadmap.

Join the waitlist for early access: https://derive.deform.cc/waitlist/

Expanded Options: 0-Day and Altcoin Trading

Active traders will continue to see expansion on our existing product set.

In 2025, we’re doubling down on innovation with dramatically improved liquidity on 0-day-to-expiry (0DTE) and altcoin options. These products open new avenues for traders, enabling highly precise, short-term bets and deeper exposure to the longer tail of assets.

0DTE options cater to high-frequency traders seeking to capitalize on daily volatility, while altcoin options broaden our scope, supporting assets beyond majors like ETH and BTC. There is much more to say on the GTM and TAM for these products, but it’s best saved for another time.

2. Yield Farmer: dUSD

Best-in-class yield

Crypto yield farming consistently outpaces offchain returns, yet accessing it remains overly complex. We’re changing that with two new products built on the Derive protocol, designed to make high-quality yield strategies simple and accessible.

The first is dUSD: a delta-neutral, yield-bearing asset powered by sUSDe and Derive’s lending market. It delivers seamless, derivatives-driven yield, starting with stablecoin-like collateral and expanding to crypto-native assets like ETH, BTC, and SOL.

In 2024, we forged strong partnerships with leading teams — Ethena, EtherFi, Lombard, and Swell.

In 2025, our focus is clear: combine Derive’s intuitive UX with its market-leading derivatives infrastructure to offer the best sustainable yield for any collateral.

Smart Money, simplified

For every active trader, there are 100 yield farmers seeking to park their cash and earn passive income. To capture this broad audience, we’re employing a wide-reaching go-to-market strategy:

A sleek, mobile-first interface that makes trading effortless for anyone, anywhere.
Seamless Telegram integration for lightning-fast trades tailored to TG natives.

From 2021 to 2024, we led the onchain options space. In 2025, we’re setting a new industry standard with transformative products designed to onboard millions of users onchain. The future of DeFi belongs to bold innovators, and we’re ready to lead the charge.

3. Liquidity Providers: Market Maker Vaults and Tools

One of the hardest things to do is to make money by making markets. It’s why crypto market makers often demand hurdle rates of 70% per year on their capital, while most retail participants would kill for 15%. This gap presents an opportunity, and automated market makers (AMMs) are the key to unlocking it.

In 2022, we launched a trustless, profitable options AMM that managed $20M in TVL and delivered 8% returns before sunsetting it in mid-2023. Since then, advancements in blockspace and decentralized validator sets have unlocked new design opportunities for AMMs.

In 2025, we’ll roll out a comprehensive suite of tools, from passive AMMs to advanced, customizable algorithms, enabling users to earn spreads and fees like pros. Complemented by Derive Intelligence—our in-house quant platform for signals, data, and metrics—this suite delivers: