• Bybit's Sept. 17, 2026 launch puts options on top of its stock perpetuals for SPCX and NVDA, with fractional lots and USDT settlement, per The Block.
• The product removes the two structural limits of listed U.S. equity options — fixed trading hours and the 100-share contract minimum — without adding an equivalent regulatory backstop.
• SPCX is a perpetual contract tracking SpaceX, a company Bybit itself marketed in May 2026 as a pre-IPO instrument; options on it are a derivative of a derivative, not a claim on shares.
• Bybit plans to extend the same options wrapper to Tesla, QQQ, SOXL and Micron, so the mark-price and settlement-integrity questions raised here scale with each new underlying.
• Compliance teams tracking crypto-adjacent equity exposure should treat the mark-price/funding-rate methodology, not the headline leverage, as the control gap worth auditing first.

Bybit will open options trading on its stock-perpetual contracts on Sept. 17, 2026, starting with SpaceX (SPCX) and Nvidia (NVDA), per The Block. The structural story is not the product feature list — 24/7 trading, fractional lots, USDT settlement — but what it removes: the fixed trading hours, 100-share contract minimums and registered-market oversight that bound U.S.-listed equity options. For SpaceX in particular, the new options price against Bybit's own perpetual mark, not a public share, since SpaceX has no public listing.

What Bybit is actually shipping on Sept. 17

Bybit will open options trading on its existing stock-perpetual contracts on Sept. 17, 2026 at 8 p.m. UTC, starting with SpaceX (SPCX) and Nvidia (NVDA), per The Block. The contracts trade 24/7, settle in USDT, allow fractional lot sizes, and plug into Bybit's Unified Trading Account with portfolio margin — supporting spreads, straddles and covered calls. Bybit has said it plans to add Tesla, QQQ, SOXL and Micron next, and to roll out new expiries on a regular cadence.

The two limits it removes — and what backed them

U.S.-listed equity options trade within fixed market hours and a 100-share contract minimum — frictions that also functioned as circuit breakers, giving regulators and clearinghouses windows to halt trading and margin calls time to process. Bybit's options remove both by design: continuous trading and fractional sizing, per The Block. That is a genuine product improvement for access, but the hours and lot-size floors were never purely mechanical — they were part of how registered markets contain volatility and settlement risk.

The underlying isn't the stock — it's Bybit's own perpetual

These are options on stock perpetuals, not on the shares themselves, so their value tracks Bybit's mark price for SPCX and NVDA rather than a listed exchange tape. For Nvidia, that mark can reference a continuous public price. For SpaceX, it cannot: SpaceX has no public listing, and Bybit itself marketed the SPCXUSDT perpetual in May 2026 as a pre-IPO product with up to 10x leverage (Benzinga/Chainwire, May 2026). Whether SpaceX has since completed a public listing is not confirmed by these origins.

The control gap: no disclosed mark-price audit

Neither the Sept. 17 announcement nor Bybit's earlier SPCXUSDT release discloses an independent audit of how the underlying perpetual's mark price or funding rate is calculated — the input that now also prices the new options layer. For an instrument referencing a company with no continuous public quote, that gap compounds: a manipulated or stale mark on the perpetual propagates directly into options pricing and settlement, with no listed-market surveillance layer to catch it.

What this means for compliance teams tracking the space

The fix is not to ban 24/7 equity-adjacent derivatives but to demand the same disclosure listed options require: a published, third-party-verifiable mark-price and funding-rate methodology, updated per underlying as Bybit adds Tesla, QQQ, SOXL and Micron. Firms with exposure to crypto-adjacent retail flows should treat each new underlying as a fresh diligence item — the leverage and lot-size story is the same each time, but the mark-price source and its manipulation surface are not.