Knowla / Learn / Options guide / Lesson 1
Lesson 1 of 11
The options chain
What one row of an options chain is, and which columns carry the information.
An option is a contract that gives its holder the right, not the obligation, to buy (a call) or sell (a put) a coin at a fixed price, the strike, on or before a fixed date, the expiry. The chain is the list of every such contract that exists for one coin: one row for each combination of expiry, strike, and call or put.
On the venues Knowla reads, these options are European and cash-settled: they can only be used at expiry, and what changes hands is the difference between the settlement price and the strike, not the coins themselves.
The columns that matter
Most of a chain is a handful of ideas repeated for every row.
- Price (the premium): what the contract costs. Venues publish a mark price, their fair estimate, which is steadier than the last trade.
- Strike and days to expiry: where the contract pays and how long it has to get there.
- Open interest: how many contracts are currently open. It only changes when positions are opened or closed.
- Volume: how many traded recently. Venue volume here is a rolling 24-hour figure.
- Implied volatility (IV): the annual move the price implies. It is the number you compare across strikes and expiries, because raw prices differ for reasons that have nothing to do with opinion.
- The greeks: how the price responds to the coin moving, time passing, and IV changing. Lesson 10 covers them.
How Knowla shows it
The Screener lists every contract in the latest collection with these columns and lets you filter any of them by range. Select a row to open that contract's own page. Knowla reads five venues: Deribit, OKX, and Bybit are added together as the main book, and Derive and Paradex are kept as separate books because they count open interest differently.
What it does not tell you
A chain shows what exists and what it costs. It does not show who holds it or why. Every later lesson is a way of reading more out of the same rows without pretending to know that.
See it on the data.
Open the Screener