Paradigm

What it is

A negotiation layer for institutional derivatives blocks. You request a quote on a strategy — a single option, a risk reversal, a calendar, a spot-versus-perpetual spread — the network's dealers price it, and when you deal, the whole thing is submitted as a block to whichever settlement venue you nominated, on an API key you created there. Multi-leg strategies settle atomically, so there is no legging risk between the parts.

It is not a venue, and the vendor is unusually direct about it. Its own FAQ asks "Is Paradigm an exchange?" and answers no — the contracts and their terms are created by the settlement venues, "Paradigm does not settle and clear any transactions, nor does it custody any assets or funds of any user", and it neither makes markets nor trades its own account. That is what keeps it inside this catalogue rather than out of scope with the exchanges. Your funds and margin sit at the venue; Paradigm holds a key that can submit block trades and nothing else.

The buyer is a desk, not a monthly subscriber. Access is granted, not bought — you apply with a firm's legal name, a jurisdiction and a named desk administrator, and wait to be approved. The whole product is shaped around that: quotes come from named or anonymous counterparties rather than from a screen, minimum block sizes are set per instrument by the venue, and the settings that matter are configured per desk in an admin dashboard.

Four settlement venues, not the list most write-ups carry. On 19 September 2026 the venues page lists Deribit, Bybit, Bullish and Paradex. CME, OKX and Bit.com turn up in older coverage of Paradigm and are on none of those pages now — though Bit.com is still linked from the referral page, and Bybit's delta-hedge formula in the docs still names BIT alongside it. If a comparison you are reading credits Paradigm with CME block liquidity, check the date on it.

One of the four deserves a flag rather than a footnote. Paradex is not an unrelated exchange: Paradigm publishes its own announcements and research about it, and it sits on the venues list next to three venues it has no such relationship with. Nothing about that is hidden, and it changes nothing mechanically — the Paradex connection is still an address and a trading key you generate yourself — but a network that routes to a venue its own group brought into being is a fact worth carrying into the decision.

Pricing

Paradigm's own fee is stated as zero, on all four venues. Each venue page in the help centre carries a Fees section and each one says the same sentence with the venue's name swapped in: Paradigm fees for these products are free. There is no pricing page on the site, no subscription, no seat charge and no published minimum volume.

One page contradicts that and nothing reconciles them. The referral page offers you 15% of your invitees' "Paradigm fees, when the client acts as a taker for their first year of trading" — which only makes sense if takers pay Paradigm a fee somewhere. That same page's affiliate block still links Bit.com, a venue that is no longer a settlement venue, so it is plainly not maintained at the same tempo as the venue pages. Believe the venue pages, ask about the referral page, and treat any published statement that Paradigm is unconditionally free as one you have not checked.

What you actually pay is the venue's block-trade fee, and that number lives on the exchange's fee schedule rather than anywhere on this product. For Delta-1 Spreads the product page claims "Up to 50% Less Fees Than Trading on Screen" with a concrete mechanism — spreads executed on Paradigm pay no fee on the second leg — plus a footnote that the pricing varies by venue. The per-venue arithmetic behind the headline is not published, so the claim cannot be checked from the vendor's own pages.

How a free network pays for itself is not stated. Not on the homepage, the company page, either product page, the help index or the documentation index. The plausible answer is a revenue share with the venues, and the referral page is circumstantial support for it, but the vendor does not say so.

Data & coverage

Coverage here is an instrument list, not a price feed, and it is published contract by contract with block minimums — which is the number that decides whether a desk can use this at all.

Deribit is the deepest list: BTC and ETH options in both the inverse and the USDC-margined flavours, BTC and ETH futures, and USDC options on SOL, XRP and AVAX. Minimum block sizes run from 25 contracts on BTC options and 250 on ETH options to 20,000 contracts on BTC futures, each measured per transaction.

Bybit covers BTC, ETH and SOL linear options, BTC inverse futures, and spot in BTC, ETH, SOL, AVAX and XRP against USDT. Its minimums are quoted per leg rather than per transaction — 0.01 BTC on BTC options, 0.1 ETH, 1 SOL, 1 USD on spot — which is a materially different rule for a multi-leg strategy and easy to skim past.

Bullish is BTC only: USDC-settled European BTC options and BTC futures, perpetual and dated, with minimums of 0.0005 and 0.0001 BTC. It went live as a settlement venue in July 2026, so it is the newest and thinnest of the four.

Paradex carries BTC, ETH and HYPE options plus a separate list of perpetuals, all cash-settled in USDC. It is a Starknet appchain rather than a centralised exchange, so its credentials are a wallet address and a private trading key instead of an API key and secret.

Notice what is absent across all four: no ETH on Bullish, nothing beyond the top handful of underlyings anywhere, and no venue at all outside these four. This is a block market for liquid majors, and the long tail is not in it.

Pricing a multi-leg strategy, Paradigm takes the quoted strategy price and derives individual leg prices — as close to mark as possible, in whole ticks, inside each venue's own min and max, and preserving delta relationships between strikes. Where a venue's own min and max bands overlap between strikes, which the docs say happens on Bullish and Paradex, it hands the job back to the maker and submits the typed leg prices unchecked. That is documented behaviour rather than a bug, and it is worth knowing before you quote a straddle on either venue.

Integrations

Venue connections are block-scoped keys. Deribit wants Block Trade at read_write and Trade at read; Bybit wants Block Trade read-write plus Positions, a key created as "Connect to Third-Party Applications", and the account switched to One-Way position mode; Bullish wants a Trading Key with Trade enabled plus an Account ID; Paradex wants an address and a trading private key. Every one of those pages repeats the same line — the key does not give Paradigm access to your account, only the ability to submit block trades on your behalf. You can attach several keys per venue and switch between sub-accounts.

The API is REST plus JSON-RPC over WebSocket, authenticated with a Paradigm access key and a signed request, with notification channels for order-book, quote, order and trade events. Rate limits are per desk and not per key, so you cannot buy headroom by minting more credentials: most REST calls get 500 requests per second, creating an RFQ is capped at one per three seconds, and an unfiltered quote cancel at five per ten seconds. The spreads product's limits are the only ones Paradigm will adjust on request.

Servers are in AWS eu-west-2, which is the number to weigh if anything you run is latency-sensitive, and Paradigm publishes its egress IPs so you can lock the venue key down to them. A testnet exists alongside production and is provisioned by asking client services, with no stated limit on how many test accounts a customer may have.

There is no trading MCP server. The only MCP endpoint on any Paradigm host is the one the documentation platform generates for reading the docs, advertised for use from Claude Code or Cursor. It answers questions about the manual; it does not place a trade.

The client is a browser app. The Electron desktop build is discontinued — the download page now walks you through installing the site as a Chrome progressive web app and, below that, through uninstalling the old Electron one.

Limitations

No US persons, no Canadian persons. The restricted-jurisdictions page excludes both outright, by legal definition rather than by IP, alongside the sanctions territories. For UK and EU individuals there is a further threshold — an attestation of a financial-instrument portfolio over 500,000 EUR. For a large share of readers this card ends there.

Onboarding collects government identification. The vendor confirmed as much in the worst possible way: an August 2026 notice discloses that a vulnerability in Metabase, a third-party analytics tool Paradigm used, let an attacker reach a subset of end-user data including "email and mailing addresses, dates of birth, official government identification numbers, and other personal details". Paradigm states its own infrastructure was untouched and that API keys were never at risk. Whatever weight you give that, the incident is dated, disclosed and first-party, and it tells you what the onboarding file contains.

It computes nothing. No chart, no screener, no greeks, no implied-volatility surface, no funding or open-interest history — the full documentation index is 38 pages and none of them is an analytics page. The one greek that appears anywhere is delta on an auto-filled hedge leg, and it is read from "the respective venue's live market data, including Options Delta, Mark Price, and the Underlying Futures Price" rather than fitted by Paradigm. If you want a volatility surface you will be running it beside something else.

Takers cannot cancel a requested order. You submit, and you find out from the response whether it worked. Execution is also throttled to one per two seconds per product, and market creation to one per three seconds.

Market Maker Protection cannot be turned off. Two of your resting orders being hit inside a one-second window cancels every order that desk has on the product and blocks new ones for up to ten seconds. The trigger conditions are configurable per desk; the feature itself is not.

Orders survive maintenance and you cannot pull them. During a platform-state change Paradigm will not cancel your orders for you, and while the state is UNAVAILABLE neither the UI nor the API can cancel them either — only the subsequent cancel-only window can. The documented mitigation is to remember to flatten before scheduled maintenance.

Quotes are not aggregated into price levels the way an exchange book is, which the docs attribute to venue block-size minimums. If you have built anything that expects a conventional depth ladder, it will need reworking.

You cannot trade against yourself, even across two of your own desks, unless each one is wired to a different venue sub-account.

Alternatives

If what you need is the same block liquidity inside a screen that also prices and risks the book, SignalPlus embeds Paradigm quotes in its options dashboard — it was the first third-party application to do so — and is free and open to sign up by email. That is the shorter route for anyone who is not going to clear the institutional onboarding here.

If the desk framing is wrong for you altogether and you want one screen over venues you trade retail, Velo is the other end of this category: a subscription, a chart, and order entry on two venues.

If the desk is real but block negotiation is only part of what it needs — routing, algos, reporting, a ledger — then the comparison is not with Paradigm at all but with a full order and execution management system such as Talos, which covers a much wider venue list and, like this one, quotes rather than publishes.

And if you only wanted the options analytics that Paradigm deliberately does not have, Laevitas sells the greeks and the calibrated surface on their own, in market data.