Onchain Options Exchange Plans Bold Token Expansion to Compete With Giants
Derive, an onchain options exchange, is weighing a major shift in its token model.
Co-founder Nick Forster has suggested boosting the supply of DRV by half, adding 500 million tokens to strengthen the platform’s foundation and speed up partnerships with large financial players.
The additional tokens would flow to the Derive Foundation, which oversees the project’s long-term strategy. Forster argued that expanding the supply is necessary to compete with giants in the options market, pointing to Coinbase’s $2.9 billion takeover of Deribit as an example of the scale Derive must measure up against. He also revealed that a significant deal for institutional-grade custody and liquidity has already been secured, though details remain under wraps.
Nearly half of the new tokens would go to the core team, with restrictions in place: they would vest gradually over four years and could not be sold unless DRV’s market cap climbs above $150 million. At present, DRV’s value hovers near $28.5 million. For investors, the dilution would be capped at just over 8% per year for four years.
The move is contentious because Derive had previously committed to holding its supply steady during the rebrand from LYRA to DRV, when the cap was set at one billion tokens. Yet Forster insists fresh issuance is critical for growth and for keeping the team engaged as rivals expand.
This proposal follows a turbulent few months for Derive. Its attempted merger with Synthetix collapsed in May after investor pushback, leading to a shake-up in both team members and backers. With the new plan, Derive is betting that extra firepower in the form of tokens will help it win credibility in a market dominated by larger, well-capitalized competitors.
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Alex is Editor-in-Chief of Coindoo and co-founder of Millennial Media Group, with nearly a decade of experience covering financial markets - crypto first, then everything else. It started in 2016 with Bitcoin. Like most people at the time, he didn't fully understand it - so he kept digging. Blockchain, tokenomics, the projects, the cycles. That curiosity never stopped, and eventually pulled him into traditional markets too: equities, commodities, macro. Not because he left crypto behind, but because you can't properly understand one without the other. What drives him is straightforward: he wants to know why something is happening, not just that it's happening. Most market coverage stops at the headline - price up, price down, here's a chart. Alex finds that kind of reporting actively unhelpful. If you walk away from an article without understanding the mechanism behind the move, what did you actually learn? He holds a degree in Tourism from New Bulgarian University - not the most obvious path into financial markets, but markets have a way of pulling in people who are simply too curious to stay out. He has authored over 200 in-depth analyses and more than 10,000 articles across crypto and traditional finance. He still thinks every day in markets teaches him something new. That's probably why he hasn't stopped.
