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In short: you are about to buy an option to hedge and want the real price right now. This tool reads the live Deribit order book and names each real listed contract with its price and the best offers to buy and sell. It also tells you where to place your order, such as halfway between those two offers, and says so when the gap is too wide to trust the price. Tool: price_options_live Use it for “what would it cost to hedge this, right now”. Every leg is a real listed contract, named in the answer with its mark, its bid and its ask.

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What it answers

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Where to put the order

A mark is not a price anybody gets, so the answer prints the width of the book, which end this side pays, and the limit to place:
  • Rest at the mid. On these books that usually fills, and it costs half the spread rather than all of it.
  • Crossing pays the ask when buying and takes the bid when selling. You pay that for a certain fill, and on a wide strike it can exceed the edge the hedge was bought for.
  • Width shows how far to trust the mark. A few percent means the mark is a fair estimate. Wider than 25% is a strike nobody trades, and a premium read off its mark can be out by more than the premium itself. The answer says so when it is.
  • A one-sided book has no mid. Far out-of-the-money strikes are routinely bid with no offer. The answer advises no limit there instead of inventing a level from one quote.

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The volatility curve, by expiry

The same chain that prices the legs carries every listed expiry, so the answer also prints at-the-money implied volatility by tenor and names the shape. An upward sloping curve is the ordinary state: a long-dated hedge costs more per day than the index implies. An inverted one (near-dated volatility above far-dated) is what a frightened market looks like, and makes short cover the expensive end. A single index number cannot show either.

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The mark is not a fill

Deribit’s mark sits between a bid and an ask, and both are shown. A real fill is at one of those.

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The nearest listed contract, named

Deribit lists only some expiries and strikes. Asking for 365 days gets whatever is nearest (285 days in the example above), and the answer names the instrument, so the substitution is visible rather than hidden inside a number.

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A quote is denominated in the underlying

Deribit prices an option as a fraction of the underlying: a mark of 0.16362 on ETH means 0.16362 ETH, not sixteen cents. The tool converts it; anything reading the raw API must too, or protection looks three orders of magnitude cheaper than it is. price_options prices from recorded daily data and adds the dear-or-cheap reading. This one is the venue’s own book, and is the right call when the next step is placing the trade.