Bitget added over 540 US stock and index options to its Stock+ product on July 2, 2026. Trading is limited to single-leg long calls and long puts, with full cash payment of the premium. The c
Bitget put more than 540 US-listed stock and index options inside its Stock+ tab on July 2, 2026. The exchange’s 125 million users across 150 regions can now buy Nvidia calls or S&P 500 puts with money that already sits in their crypto wallets, no outside brokerage required. Gracy Chen, Bitget’s CEO, called the launch the final piece of what she describes as a universal exchange, a venue where users stop splitting their net worth between an offshore crypto wallet and a Western broker. Whether 125 million people raised on perpetual futures can adapt to contracts that expire on a Friday and freeze all weekend is a separate question, and probably the one that decides if this product outlives its promotional phase.
The setup itself is deliberately simple. A user holding USDT or Bitcoin sells into stablecoins or fiat, opens the Stock+ tab, and buys the contract from the same dashboard where they trade crypto. Bitget limited the launch to single-leg long calls and long puts. No covered calls, no spreads, no writing options at all.
That restriction cuts both ways. It shields inexperienced traders from positions with unlimited loss potential, and it also caps what serious options traders can do on the platform, which says a lot about who Bitget actually wants here. This product is built for the retail speculator looking for a cheap, defined-risk bet on a Tesla earnings call, and a long call already serves that person well.
The launch sweeteners point the same way: zero commissions during the opening phase, free real-time options quotes for 30 days, and a $15 Nvidia stock bonus for the first 2,000 users who trade a contract. The free data window is a genuine perk, since legacy brokers routinely charge monthly fees for real-time options streams. The $15 bonus is acquisition bait for small accounts, and Bitget knows it.
Bitget’s crypto futures run up to 100x leverage. The new options carry none – buyers pay the full premium upfront, in cash. The gap is not an oversight. An option already moves several times faster than its underlying stock, so the leverage sits inside the contract itself, and stacking borrowed money on top would let a losing trade burn through more than a user deposited. Bitget has no appetite for chasing negative balances across 150 jurisdictions. US retail brokers apply the same full-premium rule for the same reason.
The cash requirement also quietly caps the damage per trade. A user who pays $200 for a call can lose $200 and nothing more. On a platform where most accounts are small, that predictability keeps a new and unfamiliar asset class from generating the kind of blowups that turn into support tickets and regulatory complaints.
FeatureCrypto Perpetual FuturesUS Stock Options (Stock+)Maximum leverageUp to 100xNone, 100% cash premiumExpirationNone, funding fee insteadFixed dateTrading hours24/7/3659:30-16:00 ET, weekdays onlyContract types at launchLong and short positionsLong calls and long puts onlyExpiration is the behavioral problem nobody at Bitget can solve with a promo bonus. Crypto perpetuals never expire – a trader pays a small funding fee and holds a long BTC position for months. A stock option dies on the date printed on the contract. An out-of-the-money Nvidia call loses value every day through theta decay even when the stock goes nowhere, and it settles at exactly zero if the move never arrives. Traders coming from perpetuals have no muscle memory for any of this.
Bitget’s own marketing leans on a hedging scenario. A trader holding a large book of AI-linked altcoins buys Nvidia puts before earnings, Nvidia misses, the stock drops 10%, and the puts jump 300% to offset the crypto drawdown. On paper the math works. In practice the example skips its own failure modes. If Nvidia beats, the puts expire worthless while the altcoins can still sell off for unrelated reasons. And if bad news lands on a Saturday, the crypto side of the portfolio bleeds in real time while the options position stays frozen until Monday at 9:30 a.m. New York time. The hedge covers exactly one category of risk: the kind that arrives on a weekday during US market hours.
Bitget has not explained how the product earns revenue after the zero-commission window closes. Exchanges typically make it back through spreads, reintroduced fees, or the currency conversion leg, and that last one deserves attention here. Every options trade on Stock+ requires converting crypto into stablecoins or fiat first, and Bitget controls the pricing on that hop.
The larger commercial logic probably has little to do with options revenue at all. Bitget’s volume falls when crypto goes sideways and retail traders drift away from the platform. Equity options give those same users something volatile to trade through a crypto winter – Fed decisions, tech earnings season – with capital that never leaves the exchange. Deposits that stay put are the actual prize.
Neither Binance nor OKX lists real equities alongside crypto. Binance came closest in 2021 with tokenized stock trading and pulled the product withinweeks after German regulators objected and other authorities issued warnings. Bitget routes through actual listed options instead of synthetic tokens, a cleaner legal structure, though selling US securities exposure to users in 150 regions still touches more securities regimes than any single license covers. The single-leg restriction may loosen or tighten based on regulator reaction well before user demand gets a vote.
Fintech analysts read the launch as a market-share raid on Robinhood and Interactive Brokers in non-US markets, and the timing supports that reading. Both brokers have been expanding crypto access for years. Bitget is running the same play in reverse, and it is trying to reach those customers first.
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