The story
John Jansen had been trading options in Amsterdam since 1999 when he came across Bitcoin. With his brother Marius he set out to build an options exchange for Bitcoin, putting in $230,000 of their own money and working from Marius's bedroom. Deribit went live in 2016, but early volumes were tiny, and $1 million in a day felt like a win. Institutional traders arrived in 2018 and the exchange took off. In 2022 a crypto hedge fund that was also a shareholder collapsed owing Deribit more than $80 million, and in November that year hackers took about $28 million from its hot wallets; the company covered the loss from its own balance sheet and client assets were not affected. In 2024 Deribit moved its global headquarters from Panama to Dubai after receiving a conditional VARA licence, with John Jansen commenting as co-founder. Coinbase completed its purchase of Deribit in August 2025 in a deal announced at about $2.9 billion.
