ClickOptions brings to the market a platform built on the principle that transparency, not marketing, should determine who wins institutional flow. At its core is flow-implied pricing, a live, reactive model shaped by genuine order flow, skew, and sentiment rather than fixed theoretical assumptions. The result: sharper, more realistic prices at sizes that actually matter to professional traders.
But ClickOptions goes a step further by making its competitiveness measurable. Its public “All-In” Benchmark Cards publish daily spread and depth metrics, offering the industry’s first auditable view of true execution cost. Traders, analysts, and media can independently confirm whether the platform is delivering cheaper all-in prices than alternative venues; no hidden caveats, no selective snapshots.
The execution architecture blends a central order book and custody with a community-funded underwriting vault, achieving CeFi-level performance with DeFi-grade proof. Every trade is backed by on-chain receipts, and real-time spread and depth indicators are available as embeddable widgets for market commentators.
In this Interview with TechBullion, Maris Kalnins, CEO and Co-Founder of ClickOptions introduces a new crypto options benchmark with price discovery you can actually audit.
Please tell us more about yourself.
My name is Maris Kalnins, and I am the CEO and Co-Founder of ClickOptions. I’ve spent the last two decades working across FX, crypto, and derivatives markets, primarily on the institutional side.
Before co-founding ClickOptions, I built trading platforms, liquidity systems, and data-driven trading strategies that relied heavily on analysing trading flow data. This work frequently revealed clear trading opportunities in crypto assets, but I often had to skip them because options were consistently priced above fair value, making execution inefficient.
That repeated experience is what ultimately motivated me to build a platform that delivers fair, transparent, and executable options pricing for everyone.
What inspired ClickOptions to prioritise provable, transparent pricing and why is this so critical for today’s crypto options market?
Most crypto options venues display transparent order books, but the real issue isn’t the book; it’s the pricing itself. Options are often priced above fair value, and traders end up overpaying simply because every venue uses similar pricing logic and similar markups.
We created ClickOptions to solve this by giving traders provable, real-time pricing transparency. Users can clearly see how our prices compare to fair value and between venues, verify that spreads are justified, and execute their strategies, whether directional, hedging, or arbitrage, without hidden markups.
As crypto adoption grows, traders deserve more sophisticated tools and fairer pricing, not the same inflated premiums used across the industry. Our goal is to make options trading more efficient, more accessible, and built on pricing that users can actually trust.
Could you give us a walkthrough of how the platform works end-to-end, from pricing to execution, and what differentiates the user experience from other crypto options venues?
ClickOptions is built around three core components that together deliver fair pricing, fast execution, and a uniquely trader-friendly experience:
1. Flow-Implied Pricing Engine
Our pricing engine uses real market flow, volume distribution, and sentiment to generate premiums and spreads. Because it is flow-driven rather than a statistical model, it adjusts instantly to directional pressure and market imbalance.
We quote at fair value, and often below.
The flow-implied model actively compresses premiums, making trading far more lucrative for option buyers and even creating arbitrage opportunities between exchanges. This is a key differentiator in a market where most platforms systematically overprice options.
2. Real-Size Execution at Best-of-Book Pricing
What traders see on the platform is exactly what they can execute. Prices are tradable at the displayed contract size, whether the order is small or large.
While we will introduce a full order book in the next development phase, our current architecture focuses on quoting directly at the best of the book with solid executable volume, ensuring consistent fills without requotes and a clean user experience.
3. Central Execution With a Community Underwriting Vault
Trades execute centrally for speed and stability, while a community vault underwrites the risk side.
At this stage, the vault is funded by market makers; over time, it will expand to include additional liquidity participants.
Users can trade options on the platform and, separately, may choose to participate in the vault’s underwriting model, forming a dual-sided ecosystem without introducing short selling on the trading interface.
From a user perspective, ClickOptions delivers a professional yet simple trading experience, clean charts, intuitive order entry, and fast execution, while the underlying system ensures fairness and transparency at every step.
How does flow-implied pricing, driven by real market flow, skew, and sentiment, deliver materially better execution than traditional model-based quoting?
Statistical models assume a theoretical “fair value” that often ignores what the market is actually doing in real time. But markets move because of flow, not formulas, and that is where model-based pricing breaks down.
Flow-implied pricing delivers better results because it reacts to actual buying and selling pressure:
- In balanced markets, premiums naturally tighten toward, and often below, fair value.
- In one-sided markets, the engine exposes discounts on the non-pressured side to restore balance.
- Instead of adding markups, we add discounts, making pricing more efficient for traders.
This approach reflects real market-maker risk, not theoretical assumptions, which results in tighter spreads, fairer execution, and stable pricing even during volatility spikes.
Why has the industry lacked auditable pricing, and how are your Daily Benchmark Cards setting a new standard for verifiable options pricing transparency?
The reason the industry has never offered auditable all-in pricing is simple: every major venue uses similar statistical models that consistently price options above fair value. This approach naturally benefits option sellers, who are typically institutional, and creates a market where retail traders often overpay without even realising it.
At ClickOptions, we take the opposite approach. We start our pricing at fair value, and our flow-implied engine can even push premiums below fair value when market conditions allow. By publishing transparent metrics, we give users a clear way to compare what they see on our platform versus what the rest of the market is offering.
Our Daily Benchmark Cards introduce a new level of visibility by showing, average values on the spread, premium, and depth at the top of the book for the top-traded options. This doesn’t just make our own pricing auditable; it gives traders a tool to independently evaluate and compare any venue. It sets a new transparency standard for the entire crypto options market.
How does ClickOptions ensure that publicly displayed spreads and depth genuinely match what traders can execute at meaningful size across varying market conditions?
We designed the system so that the market maker and the pricing engine are bound to the displayed prices:
- No soft quotes
- No “Last Look”
- No manipulation of spreads per user
- No delayed settlement
The price is executable at the displayed size because each quote is pre-booked by the market-making engine. Whether a user trades $50 or $50,000 notional, the system fills without requotes.
This aligns ClickOptions with the execution standards of top institutional venues.
How does your CeDeFi architecture combine a central order book with on-chain accountability to deliver CeFi-level execution quality alongside transparent risk management?
Our CeDeFi architecture is designed around a simple principle: execution should feel like CeFi, but risk management should be as transparent as DeFi.
On the CeFi side, we provide:
- Ultra-fast execution
- Consistent and reliable liquidity
- A smooth, intuitive user experience
- Tight, fair spreads priced at or below fair value
On the DeFi side, the focus is not on settling trades on-chain but on making the underwriting side fully transparent.
The ClickOptions underwriting vault, which covers the risk of all trades, is a public, on-chain vault with predefined safety guardrails. Anyone can monitor:
- Vault balances
- Risk exposure
- Performance over time
- How risk is allocated and managed
This structure makes the entire risk engine auditable and trustless, even while execution remains fast and centralised.
By combining a central matching engine with a public on-chain risk-underwriting layer, traders get the best of both worlds:
CeFi speed without CeFi opacity, and DeFi transparency without DeFi execution delays.
How will your embeddable live indicators, spreads, best ask, and depth support journalists, analysts, and traders in assessing real-time market quality and transparency?
We are introducing embeddable transparency widgets that publish real-time and periodic data, Daily, Weekly, and Bi-Weekly, for the Top 5 to Top 10 traded options on ClickOptions. These indicators show key metrics such as spreads, best ask levels, and available depth at the top of the book.
Journalists, analysts, and traders can embed these widgets directly into articles, dashboards, and research reports. For the first time, market quality becomes observable and measurable, rather than something platforms simply claim.
This helps the entire ecosystem clearly evaluate which venues truly offer competitive pricing, and which ones only advertise it.
Do you expect flow-implied pricing to influence how traditional derivatives venues approach price discovery and execution fairness now that it’s proven in production?
It’s too early to say definitively, as we’ve only just begun our journey, but we believe flow-implied pricing has the potential to reshape expectations around fairness and transparency in options markets.
Our focus is not on changing the entire market overnight, but on demonstrating that pricing can be more efficient, more transparent, and more aligned with traders’ interests. If our approach proves successful at scale, it may encourage other venues to rethink how they handle pricing, spreads, and execution.
For now, we’re committed to pushing the industry forward, step by step, by showing what’s possible.
Which traders or institutions are benefiting most from ClickOptions’ pricing model and transparency framework, and what early patterns are you seeing post-launch?
The clearest beneficiaries so far are option buyers, traders who use options for market prediction, hedging existing positions, or accessing directional exposure without liquidation risk. Our pricing model gives them the ability to take controlled, predefined risk while maintaining almost unlimited profit potential, which is exactly what many traders look for but rarely get at a fair cost.
For more information:
Visit the website: Clickoptions.ai
See the actual app: https://app.clickoptions.ai/
Follow on X: https://x.com/clickoptions_ai
