Questions & answers
Everything you need to know about trading options on Volar — pricing, collateral, settlement, fees and safety.
What is Volar?
Volar is a decentralized options market for tokenized equities on Robinhood Chain. You can buy or write fully-collateralized, cash-settled options priced by an on-chain Monte-Carlo engine. It is non-custodial software: you interact with it directly from your own wallet.
What can I trade?
At launch, cash-secured puts and capped calls on SPCX, settled in the USDG stablecoin. Exotic payoffs (barrier, Asian, digital) are on the roadmap.
What does "fully collateralized" mean?
The writer of every option deposits the maximum it could ever pay out before the option goes live. That deposit is the only source of the buyer's payout, so there is no counterparty credit risk and there are no liquidations. The trade-off is capital efficiency: writing options ties up collateral.
How are premiums priced?
By simulating thousands of future price paths on-chain and averaging the option's payoff. Quoting runs in a free eth_call. For a settlement price, the engine runs two independent simulation batches and only accepts a value the two agree on within tolerance — otherwise it reverts.
What is the convergence guard?
A safety mechanism unique to Volar. Monte-Carlo estimates carry statistical noise. The guard reruns the simulation with an independent seed and compares. If the two results diverge beyond the tolerance, the contract refuses to settle on a noisy number. It bounds pricing error on-chain.
What are SPCX and USDG?
SPCX is a tokenized equity with a live on-chain price feed on Robinhood Chain. USDG (Global Dollar) is the stablecoin used to pay premiums and lock collateral. Both are existing assets on the chain.
Do I need to own the underlying to write an option?
No. Everything is cash-settled in USDG. To write a put you lock USDG equal to the strike times size; to write a capped call you lock USDG equal to the cap times size. You never need to hold SPCX itself.
What happens at expiry?
The option settles against the oracle price. If it is in the money, the buyer receives the intrinsic value from the writer's locked collateral; the remainder returns to the writer. Settlement is permissionless — anyone can trigger it once the option has expired.
Are there liquidations or margin calls?
No. Because every position is 100% collateralized from the start, there is nothing to liquidate and no margin to maintain. Once you have written or bought an option, you can leave it untouched until expiry.
What are the fees?
A small protocol fee is taken from the premium when a buyer fills an offer. There are no deposit, withdrawal, or settlement fees.
Is Volar audited?
The protocol ships with an extensive test suite, including tests that validate the pricing engine against closed-form Black-Scholes and a fork test against live Robinhood Chain oracles. A formal third-party audit is planned before mainnet incentives. Until then, treat it as experimental software and never risk more than you can afford to lose.
Is my money safe? Is it custodial?
Volar is non-custodial — the contracts never take ownership of your funds beyond the collateral you explicitly lock for an option you wrote, which is returned to you (minus any payout) at settlement. You always transact from your own wallet. That said, all smart contracts carry risk; see our Risk Disclosure.
How is this different from other options protocols?
Most on-chain options venues can only offer payoffs with a closed-form price, or they rely on under-collateralized market makers with liquidation risk. Volar prices arbitrary payoffs with a convergence-guarded Monte-Carlo engine and keeps every position fully collateralized. That combination — exotic-capable pricing plus zero counterparty risk — is the core difference.
Which chain does Volar run on?
Robinhood Chain (chain id 4663), where the SPCX equity feed and the Metronome volatility index live.