Traditional finance has a simple story about crypto options. Retail traders pile in, buy calls, chase leverage, and blow up. It is a clean narrative. According to Maxime Seiler, CEO of STS Digital, it is also wrong.
Speaking to TheStreet Roundtable, Seiler pushed back on the idea that crypto options are a one-way leverage machine. The real flow, he says, is going the other direction.
“It’s actually not that much demand of buying options,” Seiler said. “In a lot of cases, there’s a lot more demand of selling options to earn yield.”
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The trade is a standard covered call. Investors hold their crypto, sell call options against it, and collect the premium as dollar income. The same income strategy equity investors have run for decades, ported onto digital assets.
What is different is the payout. Because crypto volatility sits structurally higher than large-cap equities, the option premiums on digital assets are meaningfully richer than what a traditional covered-call program produces.
“The yields are a lot higher than they are if you do call overwriting in traditional finance,” Seiler said.
That is the trade retail holders rarely see from the outside. The loudest corner of crypto X is long 10x perps. The quieter, larger flow is holders writing premium month after month.
Seiler flagged one more wrinkle that matters for retail. The juiciest yields are not on Bitcoin or Ethereum. They sit on more volatile alts, because higher volatility means higher premium.
That is why sophisticated holders are writing calls on altcoins, not just blue-chips like Bitcoin, Ethereum, or Solana. The tradeoff is blunt. Fatter income, bigger tail risk if the underlying doubles or gets cut in half.
On the other side of the book, Seiler said the demand from traditional allocators venturing into crypto looks nothing like the retail leverage cliche. They want risk-adjusted exposure.
The vehicle of choice is the capital-protected note, which packages a bought call against a sold put spread to deliver upside without the full drawdown risk.
That pitch lands differently after the last six months, when the market halved and wiped out unhedged longs.
Seiler framed it directly. Investors want upside on Bitcoin, Ethereum, or Solana “without having the full downside risk if the market halves like it did in last half year.”