Features

Deribit maintains indexes for many currency pairs. These indexes track the spot price of an asset across multiple exchanges, and they help with the accurate valuation and settlement of derivatives instruments such as futures or options. From the included exchanges, Deribit continuously retrieves the best bid and best ask prices and calculates the mid-price. 

The exchanges included can differ between currency pairs, and exchanges that have been excluded by the system administrator, have invalid data, or have delayed order book data, are not included in the index calculation. 

The sampled exchanges are then benchmarked against the median price of the included exchanges. The values that fall outside the +/-0.5% range of the median price are adjusted to the closest bandwidth price limit. The value of the index is then calculated as the equally-weighted average of these values. 

To view the Deribit index for each currency pair, including which exchanges are currently included, go to the Deribit indexes page.

If there is just a single valid price feed, the feed will be the index. If for some reason, no price feed reaches Deribit, trading for that currency will get temporarily locked (trading disabled) until the connection is re-established or the error is determined and eliminated. 

Note: On the index page you will also see that several currency pairs have exchanges that are not currently enabled but are available as backup markets and can be enabled in the future.

The price used for the settlement and delivery of most of the derivatives contracts on Deribit is calculated as the time-weighted average of the relevant Deribit index over the last 30 min before the expiry. The Deribit index gets calculated every 4 seconds. Therefore, the final delivery price is the time-weighted average of the 450 index prices recorded in the last 30 minutes before the expiry.

All funds of a given currency held in the account are considered to be available as margin for positions in that currency. Multiple positions in the same currency will share the same pool of equity to use for margin requirements. Any unrealized profits are instantly available as collateral for trading. For more on the different types of margin accounts available on Deribit, see Margin types and usage.

Equity and margin requirements fluctuate in real time as prices change. If at any point in time, the maintenance margin requirements of the open positions is higher than the equity in the account, liquidation is triggered. For more information on liquidations, see Liquidations.

Subaccounts allow for a division and separation of a trading account, both administratively and from a margining perspective. Every account can generate a maximum of 20 sub-accounts. This functionality allows traders to have multiple externally managed accounts, as well as accounts designated for specific trades or strategies.

By default, all positions in a given currency in a Deribit account will use all of that currency in the account as margin if needed. However, subaccounts are margined separately to each other, and are considered a separate account for margining purposes. Therefore subaccounts can be used to isolate margin for a particular trade/strategy/trader, thus separating it from the rest of the account and protecting the margin held in other subaccounts or the main account.

Users can instantly transfer funds between the main account and subaccounts. Therefore, margin can be increased and decreased with no delay. The only exception to this would be if some of the funds have not been settled yet. Daily settlement happens every day at 08:00 UTC.

A block trade is a trade arranged privately between two parties that is executed directly between the two accounts, without hitting the public order books. Block trades have higher minimum trade sizes, and are therefore aimed at larger traders. There are several ways to execute block trades on Deribit, including Deribit's Block RFQ interface. For more information on the available solutions, see Block Trading.

On https://test.deribit.com, Deribit hosts a test version of the exchange. This is the perfect place to test how things in the UI work, and also test any software that connects to Deribit via the API. This is a completely separate platform to the production website, and so requires a separate account. There are no real funds on the test platform, only valueless tokens for testing purposes, which can be obtained on the test platform for free.

New updates are also first tested on the test platform before they are implemented in production, so the version you encounter on the test platform can vary from the production website.

For more information see Testnet.