Bear Market

Our protocol enables anyone to mint fully cash-settled options on real-world assets like SPX by posting on-chain collateral (e.g. USDC). We source real-time price data from decentralized oracles and allow users to mint covered calls, buy protective puts, and trade directional views all settled in USDC.

Bear Market introduces a new primitive to DeFi: option origination without holding the underlying. You don’t need to own SPX to sell a call on it when you can just post stablecoin collateral. At expiry, all options are settled in cash, based on the final price of the underlying asset. This mirrors how most institutional options work in TradFi today.

We bootstrap liquidity using idle capital such as BeraBorrows LSP pools where we put the money to use with a modularized option-origination strategy.

Additionally, Bear Market integrates yield optimization at the core of its protocol. Idle collateral (e.g. USDC backing open options) is automatically deployed into overcollateralized lending protocols, so liquidity providers earn passive yield even while underwriting options.

Our architecture is ERC-4626 compliant and modular. The protocol has been built to plug directly into existing Bera CDPs and NECT flows. We envision Bear Market as the foundation for a future suite of structured products—hedging vaults, leveraged collars, and automated market-making for exotic derivatives.

Ultimately, Bear Market bridges a critical gap in on-chain finance: it brings scalable, liquid options trading to DeFi, while embedding yield and capital efficiency into every layer.

The options issued are ERC20’s and are composable with any permissionless DEX that want to have them tradable.

We’ve built a full-stack decentralized options origination and trading protocol that enables anyone to create and trade cash-settled options on US Equities & more using only stablecoins as collateral. The protocol is deployed on Berachain and Hedera, and is powered by a suite of custom Solidity smart contracts.

On-chain, we implemented a modular architecture where users can mint call or put options against posted collateral (e.g. $USDC or $NECT), with full lifecycle support including creation, exercise, expiry, and settlement. The options are fully collateralized and settle in stablecoins based on oracle-derived prices.

To source reliable and high-frequency price data from both crypto and equities (e.g. TSLA), we integrated Pyth Hermes, which gave us a unified way to access real-world price feeds in a gas-efficient manner across both chains.

For liquidity, we developed a module that interfaces directly with BeraBorrow’s Liquid Stability Pool (LSP). This allows idle stablecoins in the LSP to be used to underwrite option positions in our protocol, increasing capital efficiency and enabling options liquidity without requiring new deposits. We designed a secure mechanism for the LSP to reclaim liquidity at any time, ensuring safety and reversibility.

The front-end is built using React and Wagmi, with RainbowKit for wallet connection and viem for contract interactions. We used Tailwind CSS for rapid styling and designed a clean, anime-inspired UI to reflect the “Bear Market” theme. The user can create and trade options through a simple interface, and LPs can monitor their underwriting vaults and yields in real-time.