Binance lists 1,000 US stock and ETF options, cleared by Alpaca

Binance opened options trading on more than 1,000 US-listed stocks and exchange-traded funds on Tuesday, physically settled through Alpaca Securities in the United States and routed by an Abu Dhabi-authorised introducing broker called Nest Trading Limited. Eligible users outside the US can buy calls and puts. Short positions and option writing are off in what the exchange calls phase one. US customers are not eligible. Losses on a bought contract are capped at the premium paid.

How the plumbing is wired

Alpaca handles execution, clearing, settlement and custody in the United States, on CoinGape's account of Tuesday's launch. When a call is exercised, Alpaca delivers the underlying shares and holds them on the user's behalf. A put delivers the other way. Nest Trading Limited, which crypto.news names as the introducing broker, routes orders to Alpaca and holds permission 260000 from the Abu Dhabi Global Market's Financial Services Regulatory Authority. Cryptoslate carries the same structure with the same three parties. Cointelegraph adds that the whole route sits inside a single Binance account, next to the exchange's tokenised stock product and its equity-linked perpetuals.

What phase one leaves in and out

Trading runs on US market hours, 9:30 to 16:00 New York time, with a 16:15 cutoff for certain ETF and ETN contracts. Only limit orders are supported. Funding runs off five currencies: USDC, USDT, USD1, U and BNB. Instructions to exercise a contract must reach Binance by a cutoff up to 30 minutes before expiry. Anything left after that goes to what CoinGape calls "best-efforts auto-liquidation", and an in-the-money position can still expire worthless if the exchange cannot close it out. The eligible list of 1,000 tickers is stated by every account. A specific catalogue is not. Cointelegraph names Tesla and Nvidia by way of example.

"Stock options are an important next step toward a fuller multi-asset platform," Binance head of exchange and trading Shunyet Jan said of the launch.

The size of the TradFi book behind the launch

The options desk plugs into a book that has grown fast. Cryptoslate puts equity-linked perpetuals on Binance at about $342.9 billion in August, roughly 79% of the exchange's TradFi perpetual activity for the month, and states that the category grew more than 800-fold from January. CryptoDaily's tally puts total TradFi volume at $433.4 billion in August, about fifteen times January's $29.5 billion. The two figures measure different slices and are not interchangeable. Equity-linked perpetuals sit inside the larger total. Both counts put an eight-month curve on the same file.

The rules the exchange writes around itself

The exchange requires users to answer a suitability questionnaire covering financial circumstances, experience, risk tolerance and objectives, and to sign a disclaimer before the first options trade. Availability turns on where a user is. The US is the largest single carve-out. The design is familiar from Binance's other TradFi routes. The settlement chain is a US broker's, and the currency of account is a dollar-linked stablecoin. Tokenised US equities have travelled a comparable route: on-chain transfers in that category ran to $29.5 billion earlier in the summer, on a curve of their own. Payward's own second-quarter numbers, reported this week alongside a delayed US listing target, showed platform volume down 13% year on year. Binance is pushing volume-adjacent products into the same customer base by a different door. Kraken's tokenised US equities settle differently, but the two arrivals sit inside the same September week. What Tuesday's launch does not settle is how the options catalogue is priced against similar products at regulated brokers off the exchange, or how quickly phase-two options writing follows the long-only debut.