• CVEX, which is partly owned by Saxo Bank founder Lars Seier Christensen, will see its mainnet arrive on Arbitrum Stylus.

• The decentralized exchange has more than 400,000 users signed up for early access and a community of millions that follow it on social media and messaging platforms.

Crypto Valley Exchange (CVEX), a decentralized exchange (DEX) focused on trading crypto futures and options, said it plans to go live on Jan. 8 following a period of testing.

The exchange, partly owned by Saxo Bank founder Lars Seier Christensen, emerges into a market dominated by the Panama-based centralized exchange Deribit with more than 400,000 users signed up for early access and "a community" of millions who follow it on social media and messaging platforms, according to a press release.

Futures and options account for a huge amount of trading in traditional markets, but crypto derivatives are disproportionately small, CEO James Davies, a co-founder of the company, said. Large centralized exchanges historically opted for payments licenses, which didn’t allow for derivatives trading, though a gap in the regulations regarding perpetuals allowed those products to be introduced.

In general, though, the options market has been held back, but it should be huge in crypto because there's all this risk passing around, Davies said in an interview.

“We've got a perpetual based market because nobody built infrastructure outside of that,” Davies said. “We know futures are better and that there are thousands of projects that want to hedge and that would prefer to trade options on-chain than use expensive OTC options.”

CVEX will see its mainnet arrive on Arbitrum Stylus, a version of the fast and cheap Ethereum overlay blockchain that uses WebAssembly-compatible languages.

Users will be able to avoid the high funding fees typically tied to perpetual futures on other platforms, and the exchange promises trading fees "up to 16x lower" than incumbent centralized exchanges (makers are charged just 0.002%, and takers only 0.003%).

This launch comes on the heels of a $7 million fundraise announced earlier this year, co-led by SALT and Fabric Ventures, with significant contributions from AMDAX, Wave Digital, Funfair Ventures, Seier Capital, Five T Fintech and Saxon.