The story
Marius Jansen co-founded Deribit with his brother John, a professional options trader from Amsterdam. The two wanted an options exchange for Bitcoin, put in $230,000 of their own money and turned Marius's bedroom into their first office. Deribit launched in 2016 to very little interest, with $1 million in daily volume counting as a good day, before institutional traders began using it in 2018. The exchange then survived two heavy blows in 2022: a hedge fund shareholder that collapsed owing it more than $80 million, and a hot wallet hack of about $28 million that Deribit covered from its own balance sheet. By 2024 it was handling over $1 trillion a year in trading volume, and it had moved its headquarters to Dubai. Coinbase completed its acquisition of Deribit in August 2025, a deal announced at about $2.9 billion.
