Deribit Suffers Outage Over ‘Hardware Issues,’ May Miss Thursday’s Options Expiry

UPDATE (09:35 UTC, Aug. 27, 2020): Deribit has tweeted the issue is resolved and trading is once again live.

The most popular cryptocurrency options exchange, Deribit, is suffering a severe service outage.

• According to company tweets early on Thursday, the trading platform is suffering "hardware issues" and a technician has been called to reboot its servers and bring services back to normal functionality.
• "We are not hacked and your funds are safe," an initial tweet stated.
• Deribit went on to warn that it may not have its systems back online in time for today's daily options expiry.
• In that case, the firm will "manually adjust the options expiry to reflect the actual market at the time of expiry."
• The value used for the adjustment would be drawn from Deribit's index as listed on test.deribit.com.
• However, the outage may knock confidence in the exchange with the news that Deribit doesn't seem to have server redundancy to avoid such severe ramifications from technical issues.
• Similar issues have affected top U.S. spot exchange Coinbase in the past, leading it to eventually pledge to do more in terms of redundancy provision.
• Deribit may, in fact, have been lucky the outage didn't occur Friday, when over $700 million-worth of monthly contracts are set to expire, most of them on Deribit.
• Today's daily bitcoin option expiry is worth $22.8 million, alongside $6.5 million in ether options.
• Deribit is by far the most popular options exchange in the crypto space in terms of trading volumes:

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