Can You Trade S&P 500 Options With USDC? How Hypercall on Hyperliquid Works, What It Costs and the Risks (October 2026)

What Hypercall is, in plain terms

Hypercall is an options venue that sits on top of Hyperliquid, the perpetual-futures exchange that has become one of the busiest places to trade crypto and US stock perps around the clock. Hyperliquid itself offers perpetual futures; Hypercall adds options, which are contracts with a fixed strike price and a fixed expiry date.

• A call option pays if the index finishes above the strike at expiry.
• A put option pays if the index finishes below the strike.
• If the option finishes on the wrong side of the strike, it expires worthless and the buyer loses the premium paid.

According to Hypercall's documentation, its options are European-style and cash-settled: you cannot exercise early, and at expiry the system credits or debits USDC automatically instead of delivering any shares or index units.

How much the S&P 500 contract pays

Each Hypercall S&P 500 contract has a $1 multiplier, meaning one index point is worth $1 at settlement, CoinDesk reported. The example given: a call with a 7,000 strike pays $100 if the index settles at 7,100.

The payout is the intrinsic value, max(0, settlement − strike) for a call and max(0, strike − settlement) for a put, multiplied by position size, per Hypercall's settlement page. Your profit is that payout minus the premium you paid to open the trade.

The settlement price is not the official S&P 500 close from the stock exchange. Hypercall uses a 30-minute time-weighted average of the Hyperliquid oracle index price for the underlying, ending at the expiry time; CoinDesk describes this as the average price over the final 30 minutes of Hyperliquid's S&P 500 perps. That is a key difference from listed options in the US.

What it costs right now

Hypercall launched with venue fees disabled. Its fee page lists 0% maker and taker fees, 0% settlement and liquidation fees, free deposits and network gas only on withdrawals while the launch policy is active.

The future schedule is "not active on day one" and has no start date on the page, so check the fee page before every trade if you plan to use it regularly. The real cost today is the bid–ask spread: with only two market makers active and three more being onboarded, according to the founder, spreads can be wide outside the busiest strikes.

Who is trading it, and on what

By CoinDesk's figures, open interest is about $49 million, of which $47 million is in S&P 500 options. Volume concentrates in options that expire the next day, the founder, Jake Sylvestre, told CoinDesk: traders use them to take a view on the next session's move.

Single stocks are popular too. Options on SpaceX, Nvidia, Micron and SanDisk make up more than half of all trades, followed by Apple, Microsoft, Meta, Alibaba, ether and bitcoin. Hypercall says its market makers hedge on Hyperliquid's perpetual futures, including on weekends, because earnings or economic data can move a stock while its home exchange is closed.

For scale: Deribit, the Coinbase-owned crypto options leader, routinely sees billions of dollars in daily volume. Hypercall is a niche venue growing fast from a small base.

The risks you should actually weigh

1. Off-chain matching. Hypercall's architecture page says order matching, margin checks and liquidation orchestration run on its backend, and that in Mainnet Alpha these operations are not fully cryptographically verifiable. Collateral is held on-chain, but you are trusting the operator to match fairly. 2. Next-day expiries lose value fast. An option that expires tomorrow is cheap for a reason; most out-of-the-money short-dated options expire worthless. 3. Liquidation on margin accounts. If you sell options or use margin, an account whose equity falls below maintenance margin gets a 60-second grace period in which only risk-reducing orders are allowed, then enters a Dutch-auction liquidation that cannot be stopped, according to the docs. 4. Settlement reference. Because settlement uses Hyperliquid's oracle average rather than the official index close, weekend and after-hours prints can differ from what you see on a stock chart. 5. Eligibility and tax. Neither source states which countries may use Hypercall; check your local rules before trading derivatives on US indices.

How this compares with other venues

Other platforms are moving into the same space. Bybit began offering round-the-clock options on stock perpetuals on 17 September, starting with SpaceX and Nvidia, and Binance offers options on more than 1,000 US stocks and ETFs to eligible users outside the US, CoinDesk reported. If you want simple exposure to US shares rather than options, our guide to buying US stocks with USDC on Bybit covers a product with no expiry dates.

How to act on this

If what you want is round-the-clock exposure to the S&P 500 without option expiries, the underlying instrument Hypercall's market makers hedge with is the S&P 500 perpetual listed on Hyperliquid. You can open a Hyperliquid account through our Hyperliquid profile and sign up with code NEXU888; our Hyperliquid referral guide explains where the code goes and what it changes. Keep leverage low around US data releases such as today's CPI report, when index perps can move sharply in minutes.

Quick answers

Is Hypercall part of Hyperliquid? It is a separate options exchange built on Hyperliquid's infrastructure; it uses Hyperliquid's oracle prices for settlement and Hyperliquid perps for hedging.

What do Hypercall options settle in? USDC, in cash. No shares or index units are delivered.

Can I trade on weekends? Yes. Hypercall lists daily, weekly and monthly expiries, including over weekends.

What are the fees? Zero during the launch phase. Planned later fees are 0.02% maker and 0.05% taker on notional, capped at 12.5% of the premium.

How big is it? About $640 million of notional volume since June and about $49 million of open interest, by CoinDesk's figures, small next to Deribit.