When reflecting on the most impactful periods in cryptocurrency history, the summer of 2022 undoubtedly stands out. Investors faced unprecedented turmoil: first, the collapse of the Terra ecosystem, resulting in significant losses for institutional and retail investors alike; and shortly thereafter, the rapid downfall of FTX, one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges, plunging crypto into a prolonged bear market lasting until 2024.
Amid this harsh market winter, while many companies retreated or scaled back their operations, one startup—SignalPlus—displayed remarkable resilience and growth.
Rising in the Bear Market: Achieving Leadership in Cryptocurrency Options and Capturing 20% Market Share Within Two Years
Founded at the peak of the bull market in 2021, SignalPlus specializes in cryptocurrency derivatives infrastructure and automated trading solutions. Shortly after its establishment, the company confronted the severe bear market. Rather than pulling back, SignalPlus leveraged the downturn as an opportunity to refine its products, advance its technology, and achieve significant breakthroughs.
Co-founders Chris Yu, a former Goldman Sachs trader, and James Shan, a serial entrepreneur, lead SignalPlus alongside a core team of experts from Wall Street investment banks and technology giants such as Alibaba and ByteDance. Their extensive experience in trading practices and product development has gradually earned client trust, even as market enthusiasm dwindled to historic lows.
By 2023, SignalPlus had garnered recognition from several prominent investment institutions and established collaborations with well-known cryptocurrency exchanges like Binance, Bybit, Deribit, and OKX. Within just two years, SignalPlus managed to capture approximately 15-20% of the total options market trading volume, driving significant revenue growth.
At the end of 2024, SignalPlus again attracted recognition from the capital market, successfully securing an $11 million Series B financing round. This funding was led by AppWorks and OKX Ventures, with participation from reputable institutions such as the Avenir Group and HashKey, equipping SignalPlus with resources to accelerate its global expansion and innovation in institutional-grade trading tools.
What enabled SignalPlus to distinguish itself during the prolonged market downturn? Simply put, it provides sophisticated cryptocurrency options trading tools tailored specifically for institutional clients, including institutional-grade trading dashboards, automated market-making robots, and structured product automation solutions. These tools streamline derivatives trading, making it more efficient, convenient, and cost-effective. Additionally, SignalPlus offers users advanced, real-time risk management capabilities, eliminating the need for constant monitoring by traders and significantly reducing the expenses associated with maintaining large trading teams.
Finding the Potential: SignalPlus’s Reverse Discovery in Cryptocurrency Options Trading
Cryptocurrency options trading is booming today, but the landscape was significantly different in 2021 when SignalPlus was founded. Co-founder Chris Yu recalls that, initially, their goal was to establish a hedge fund specializing in cryptocurrency derivatives. However, they quickly realized the entire cryptocurrency options market at the time accounted for less than 0.5% of perpetual contract trading volume. This surprisingly small size sparked their curiosity: “Why was the cryptocurrency options market so underdeveloped?”
Chris explored various derivatives trading instruments and platforms, uncovering three primary pain points holding the market back. First, the cryptocurrency options market lacked a professional and stable infrastructure. Unlike traditional financial institutions, where traders have sophisticated systems for trade analysis and real-time risk management, the cryptocurrency market largely relied on intuition and experience, making precise risk assessment nearly impossible.
Second, liquidity was severely limited. Few market makers existed in cryptocurrency options, resulting in significantly lower liquidity and stability compared to traditional markets. Establishing a comprehensive market-making system required substantial capital, skilled personnel, and advanced technical resources—something most cryptocurrency institutions found prohibitively expensive. This created a cycle where insufficient liquidity deterred new players from entering the market.
Lastly, the overall market suffered from inadequate deal flow. Limited market makers and capital reduced market activity, leaving cryptocurrency options like a dormant field awaiting activation.
So, what triggered the “awakening” of the cryptocurrency options market within just over two years?
Chris identifies two main factors behind this rapid transformation. First, market volatility declined substantially, reducing the attractiveness of pure leveraged trading. In 2021, Bitcoin’s implied volatility peaked around 120%, but by 2024, it stabilized between 40% and 50%. Lower volatility squeezed profits from leveraged futures and perpetual contracts, making flexible instruments like options increasingly valuable for managing risk and constructing yield strategies. A similar evolution had occurred previously in traditional finance.
Second, institutional entry significantly boosted professional demand. Over the past two years, traditional financial institutions increasingly entered the cryptocurrency space, bringing extensive experience using options for hedging and leveraging in foreign exchange, commodities, and other traditional markets. Their entry naturally amplified the demand for cryptocurrency options.
Chris has witnessed similar transitions before. He recalls the period between 1995 and 2000 when foreign exchange options were also obscure and limited in scale. With improved infrastructure and professional tools, the foreign exchange options market evolved dramatically, becoming mainstream by 2010, on par with stock futures.
This historical perspective strengthens SignalPlus’s conviction: the cryptocurrency options market today parallels the early stage of foreign exchange options twenty years ago. With continued development of infrastructure and ecosystems, they believe the cryptocurrency options market has the potential to expand tens or even hundreds of times in the coming years.
From Widespread Promotion to In-Depth Cooperation: How SignalPlus Precisely Empowers Professional Organizations
Transitioning from traditional financial markets to cryptocurrency derivatives is far from a simple process for SignalPlus; rather, it is akin to fighting a technological battle from scratch. “Automation in options trading is extremely complex due to numerous factors that must be accounted for,” recalls Chris. “When we initially designed the product, we considered real trading scenarios and discovered that each trade could branch into tens of thousands of potential pathways.” To create a product truly adapted to cryptocurrency markets, SignalPlus meticulously restructured and rebuilt the mathematical models underlying automated trading, ensuring the solution resonated with market dynamics and user needs.
After developing the product, SignalPlus faced another challenging task: effectively promoting and implementing it.
At the end of 2023, SignalPlus officially launched its automated trading robots, initially opting for broad promotional strategies to rapidly gather feedback and optimize the technology. This phase revealed significant differences in user needs regarding automated trading tools.
“Our system involves as many as two to three hundred parameters,” explains Chris. “Mastering these settings and utilizing them effectively requires considerable expertise. Even seasoned traders from traditional finance typically require about two weeks of training to efficiently use our system. For users new to options trading, the learning curve is naturally steeper.”
Furthermore, SignalPlus recognized that different organizations have unique requirements for adapting and leveraging the platform. Some clients needed intensive guidance and support, prompting SignalPlus to continuously refine its service model. The goal was clear: enhance client efficiency and allocate service resources appropriately.
Starting in the second half of 2023, SignalPlus shifted its approach from widespread marketing to forging deeper cooperative relationships with institutional partners. This allowed each organization to find tailored solutions, aligning more closely with market demands and collectively advancing the industry.
“Numerous institutions expressed interest,” Chris said. “To ensure maximum effectiveness, we prioritized partnerships with teams already deeply familiar with options trading, allowing rapid adoption and efficient trading.” This strategic pivot quickly demonstrated its value. One trader from a large professional trading institution mastered the SignalPlus system within just one month, generating hundreds of thousands of dollars in profits.
This refined strategy enabled SignalPlus to concentrate on delivering high-value trading solutions specifically tailored to professional institutions, enhancing overall efficiency and resource allocation.
Importantly, Chris also observed a critical shortage of qualified options professionals. “Compared to traditional finance, the cryptocurrency market has a significant shortage of professionals with deep expertise in options trading,” he noted. “However, this gap will gradually narrow as the market matures.”
SignalPlus’s ultimate vision extends beyond providing cutting-edge trading technology. They aim to convert specialized options trading expertise into foundational market infrastructure. According to Chris, the cryptocurrency options market holds the potential to truly flourish when every participant gains the capability to engage more professionally and efficiently in options trading.
SignalPlus: The Next Unicorn in Cryptocurrency Derivatives
SignalPlus’s innovative product philosophy wasn’t created overnight; rather, it emerged from the founding team’s extensive professional experiences and deep-rooted beliefs. The partnership between Chris and James dates back to 2007 when they met during an investment competition at Shanghai Jiao Tong University.
Since then, their friendship and professional bond have grown stronger, shaped by their respective careers in traditional finance and technological entrepreneurship. Reunited by a shared vision and deep understanding of market dynamics, they formed SignalPlus to tackle real-world trading challenges head-on. Chris brings profound insights into trading market operations and pain points, while James specializes in product design and technology execution. This combination uniquely positions SignalPlus to clearly understand what needs to be done, why it must be done, and how to execute better than any competitor from day one.
This pragmatic approach is central to SignalPlus’s philosophy. From the outset, the team decided they were not interested in creating a short-term money-making tool. Instead, they sought to develop robust infrastructure that genuinely addresses market pain points and earns the trust of professional traders. Adhering to this principle has allowed SignalPlus to establish itself even during challenging bear markets, traditionally a difficult period for product promotion and growth.
As the cryptocurrency options market expands and institutional investors begin to participate more actively, SignalPlus’s future path is becoming clearer.
“We envision our automated trading infrastructure becoming the next unicorn in the cryptocurrency derivatives market,” Chris explained. “Ultimately, we even hope to bring our innovations into traditional financial markets, significantly enhancing their automation and operational efficiency. We firmly believe the market will recognize our value as long as we maintain our strategic focus and commitment to excellence.”
This article has been contributed to Asia Tech Daily.
