How every number is computed.

Where the numbers come from

Knowla reads the public market-data endpoints of five option venues about every five minutes, with no account and no key. It stores each reading as a snapshot of every listed contract: strike, expiry, open interest, 24-hour volume, mark IV, forward price, and the venue's mark price. Everything else is computed from those stored snapshots.

"All venues" is the sum of Deribit, OKX, and Bybit, each at its own latest collection. Derive and Paradex count open interest differently, so they are never folded into that sum. A page never blends sources silently: the venue shown in the header is the venue every number on the page comes from. Spot is the Deribit index price for the combined book.

Time and freshness

Crypto options trade around the clock, so there are no sessions. A trading day runs 08:00 to 08:00 UTC, the hour Deribit expiries settle. Each day is summarised at its last collection; the current day is updated at every collection and is final when the day ends.

The freshness line has three states. Current: every venue behind the page answered within the last 15 minutes. Stale: a venue has not answered for more than 15 minutes with nothing newer, and the line names it. Failing: a venue has failed three pulls in a row, and the line says why. A market that is open all the time is never described as resting.

Dollar gamma

For each contract:

GEX = gamma × open interest (coins) × price² × 1%

Gamma is the venue's published value where it gives one, and Black-76 gamma from the stored forward and mark IV otherwise. The result is the dollar change in delta for a 1% move. Calls count as positive and puts as negative. That is a convention for drawing the book, not a record of who holds what; no venue publishes holders. Net GEX is the sum over the contracts in scope. The sign of the net decides the regime.

Walls and the flip

The call wall is the strike with the most call open interest in coins, and the put wall the strike with the most put open interest, over the expiries in scope. They are counted by open interest, not by gamma.

The gamma flip comes from walking strikes from low to high and adding net gamma. Each sign change of that running total is a crossing, positioned between the two strikes by linear interpolation. A crossing counts only if the running total reaches at least 5% of the book's total absolute gamma on both sides of it. Of the crossings that count, the nearest to the price is used, and only if it lies within 25% of the price. Otherwise there is no flip, and the weather says its reading rests on the sign alone.

Gamma weather

The card looks at near-term expiries only: every expiry within 30 days, and never fewer than the nearest two. It states the range it actually used. Within that scope it takes the sign of net GEX and the distance from the price to the flip:

Gross gamma is every call GEX plus every put GEX as unsigned amounts. When net GEX is under 2% of it, the calls and puts nearly cancel and the sign can change within minutes, so the word is Unsettled whatever the flip distance. On 440 stored BTC collections (15 to 22 October 2026) the typical five-minute swing in net as a share of gross was 0.95% (median) and 1.9% (75th percentile). At a 2% band no reading jumped straight from a green word to a red one; with no band 27 did, and with 1% eight. It left 21% of those readings Unsettled.

The Since row compares the flip and net GEX with the previous collection.

The 1%, 2%, 3%, 5%, and 25% settings are our choices. No published standard sets them. The 25% limit does not change the word: a flip 3% or more away gives the same word as no flip, so any limit above 3% gives identical words, and the limit only decides whether a distant flip is shown. On 440 stored BTC collections from 15 to 22 October 2026, a counted flip existed in 289, the nearest was 0.1% to 15.7% from the price (median 9.2%), and moving the limit anywhere from 5% to 100% changed none of the 440 words. It stays at 25%, wider than any flip in that sample. One week of one market regime is a small sample. A longer explanation is in Learn: Gamma weather.

Max pain and its record

For one expiry, take each listed strike as a possible settlement price. At each, add up the intrinsic value all open calls and puts would pay, weighted by open interest in coins. Max pain is the listed strike with the smallest total. The page states how many contracts carry open interest, of how many are listed.

Accuracy. For every expiry that has settled, Knowla takes the max pain recorded for that expiry in the latest day summary at least five days before it (and no more than seven), and compares it with Deribit's published delivery price. The miss is the absolute gap as a percentage of the settlement; the typical miss is the median across expiries. Because history cannot be collected after the fact, the record only contains expiries that were listed, and recorded, five days ahead, so it starts short.

Expected move

The at-the-money IV is the mean mark IV of the contracts at the strike nearest the forward. For an expiry with T years left:

1σ move = price × IV × √T, range = price ± 1σ move

T is counted from the collection time to the expiry in 365-day years. The walls are then placed inside or outside that range in words. The range is what the options market prices, not a forecast.

Implied volatility

Mark IV is the venue's own, in percent. The surface uses out-of-the-money options only: puts below the forward and calls at or above it, open-interest weighted across venues and falling back to a plain average where nobody holds the strike. Strikes between listed ones are interpolated linearly, and nothing is drawn beyond the strikes that exist.

Average IV over time is computed over the same near-term expiries as the weather, once per collection, in two weightings: by open interest, and by 24-hour volume. Venue volume was only stored from late October 2026, so earlier points have the open-interest value only, and the page counts them. The skew draws calls and puts at each strike of one expiry on separate lines.

The greeks

All seven come from the Black-76 model with the interest rate at zero, using each contract's stored forward, strike, time to expiry, and mark IV. Delta and gamma are the closed forms. The others are exact price or delta differences:

• Theta: price at one day less to expiry, minus the price now (dollars per day). Not shown inside the last day.
• Vega: price at IV plus one point, minus the price now (dollars per IV point).
• Rho: minus time to expiry times price, divided by 100 (dollars per rate point). It is small because the rate is taken as zero.
• Vanna: delta at IV plus one point, minus delta now.
• Charm: delta at one day less, minus delta now. Not shown inside the last day.

Where a venue publishes a mark price, the Screener and Contract view show it. Where it does not, they show the model price and label it.

Where the price went

Between two consecutive collections of one contract, with the greeks taken at the start of the step:

Δprice ≈ delta·ΔF + ½·gamma·ΔF² + vega·ΔIV + theta·Δt + residual

F is the forward, ΔIV is in points, and Δt is in days. Each step is split on its own and the steps are added, so the pieces plus the start price equal the end price exactly, with whatever the model cannot explain in the residual. It is only offered when the contract has at least two trading days of stored mark prices and costs more than the larger of $1 and 0.01% of the coin's price. The page gives each reason separately.

Realized volatility

Realized volatility comes from daily closes of the Deribit perpetual. For a window of N days it is the sample standard deviation of the last N daily log returns, times √365, in percent. The windows are 7, 14, and 30 days, and a window is shown only when enough closes are stored.

Unusual activity

Each trading day contributes one volume sample per contract: the venue's rolling 24-hour volume at that day's last collection. Days stored before volume was collected are not samples. With at least five prior samples a contract is scored:

z = (volume − mean of prior days) ÷ spread

The spread is the standard deviation of the prior days, floored at a quarter of the mean and at 1% of today's volume so one print on a quiet contract is not infinitely unusual. A contract is listed at z of 3 or more. With fewer samples it is listed if it traded more than twice its open interest, and the row says which test applied. Contracts trading under about $100,000 are ignored, and the list is ordered by z (then by dollars traded for the open-interest test).

Days and changes

A day summary stores the weather, net GEX, flip, walls, max pain for every listed expiry, the expected move for the nearest expiry, put/call by volume and open interest, volume-weighted IV, call and put open interest, the expiries listed, the contract count, and the GEX profile by strike. The Changes ladder compares two summaries line by line. Wall moves are counted in listed strikes. Max pain is compared only for the same expiry; if the nearest expiry rolled, both values show with their own expiry. Open-interest change compares each contract between two days' last collections and leaves out contracts that expired between them.

Gold: where the numbers come from

No listed gold option book is free to read, so gold's options positioning comes from the options on GLD, the SPDR gold ETF, in Cboe's public delayed quotes (about 15 minutes behind). They are the deepest listed gold option book, with millions of contracts of open interest. They are options on a fund that holds gold, not on gold futures, so flows into and out of the fund can move them for reasons that have nothing to do with the metal.

The gold price is the middle of the gold index prices on Bybit, Binance, and OKX. At least two must answer, and a source more than 2% from the middle is left out.

Each contract is restated per ounce, so strikes, walls, and the flip read in gold dollars and not in GLD shares:

ratio = gold price ÷ GLD price (about 10.9: one share is about 0.092 oz)

• Strike per ounce = GLD strike × ratio.
• One contract is 100 shares, which is 100 ÷ ratio ounces.
• Gamma is the Black-76 gamma of an ounce option at the gold price, with the contract's own implied volatility and no interest rate, as for crypto.
• Dollar gamma comes out the same as it would in GLD terms; only the units change.

The ratio is measured only while the US market trades, because GLD's last price is stale otherwise and a weekend move in gold would distort it. Between sessions the last good ratio is reused, so levels hold still while the market is shut.

US option hours are Monday to Friday, 09:30 to 16:30 Eastern; the extra half hour covers the quote delay. Outside them the page says the market is closed, and gold is read hourly instead of every five minutes. Open interest is the previous day's figure from the clearing house, so it changes once a day. Strikes more than 40% from the price, and contracts with no open interest and no volume, are left out.

Gold: what none of this can tell you

• Anything about gold futures options on COMEX, the largest gold option market, which is not free to read.
• Who holds a GLD option, or why. Fund flows can drive it.
• Large far-out-of-the-money positions can set a wall far from the price; read the heatmap before trusting a wall.
• US holidays. The clock does not know them, so a holiday reads as open although nothing is trading.
• History from before collection began, a max pain record, or realized volatility: none exists for gold yet.

DeFi pools: where the numbers come from

The Pools table reads two public sources. Yield, TVL, and the fee and reward split come from the DeFiLlama yields API, for pools on Ethereum, BSC, Base, Arbitrum, Optimism, and Polygon with at least $100,000 of TVL. PancakeSwap pools come from PancakeSwap's own explorer API instead, because DeFiLlama's PancakeSwap coverage was incomplete. Both are read about every 15 minutes.

Knowla does not recalculate yields. Total APR, fee APR, reward APR, the 30-day mean, the impermanent-loss flag, and TVL are the providers' own figures. What Knowla adds is the shares, the gap to the 30-day mean, the one-word read, and the checklist, defined next.

DeFi pools: shares, the read, the checklist

Fee share and reward share are each part of the total APR, limited to the range 0 to 100%. The gap to the 30-day mean is shown only when the mean is above zero.

vs 30d = (APR − 30-day mean APR) ÷ 30-day mean APR

The read is the first of these rules that fits, in this order:

• Reward-heavy: APR above 80% and rewards above 70% of it.
• High IL risk: the provider's flag says yes or high.
• Above recent average: APR above 1.8 times the 30-day mean, a gap above 80%.
• Fee-backed: fee APR at least 60% of the total.
• Check composition: none of the above.

A pool's page adds four checks, each pass or watch: fee share of at least 60%, IL not flagged high, APR within 80% of the 30-day mean (or no mean to compare), and TVL of at least $5M. The pass count is a filter, not a score.

DeFi pools: what none of this can tell you

• What you will earn. APR is today's rate annualized, and it changes with trading and with capital.
• Your impermanent loss. The flag is coarse and the provider's; it does not know your range, entry price, or holding time.
• The price of a reward token when you sell it.
• Smart-contract, bridge, or token risk, which no table here measures.
• Gas costs, or the slippage of your own deposit and exit.
• Pools outside the six chains and the $100,000 floor, or pools a provider has not listed.

Options: what none of this can tell you

• Who holds an option, or whether it is hedged elsewhere. Gamma signs are a convention.
• Why a contract traded. Volume has no direction.
• Anything about venues Knowla does not read, or about private trades.
• The future. Max pain, walls, flips, and expected moves describe a book at a moment.
• History from before collection began. It cannot be recovered, so some records start short.

Every threshold

New to some of these ideas? The Learn section explains them in plain words: the options guide and the pools guide, one lesson at a time.