Have you ever encountered this dilemma: correctly predicting the market direction but surrendering just one second before liquidation? This is a typical predicament of traditional perpetual contracts.

With the current high volatility in the crypto market, using traditional perpetual contracts to deploy both long and short strategies involves unavoidable risks of liquidation and capital inefficiency. However, a recent approach is changing many traders' tactics — using options instruments to replace or complement perpetual contracts.

**Why can options solve the pain points of perpetual contracts?**

The key difference lies in the risk structure. With perpetual contracts, whether long or short, there is a clear liquidation price. As soon as the market hits this price, even if the subsequent market moves as you predicted, your account is already gone. Options are different — after buying a call option, you don’t fear liquidation no matter how much the price drops, as long as at expiration the price stays above the strike price, you can profit. This feature significantly reduces the execution cost of opening both long and short positions.

From a leverage perspective, perpetual contracts typically offer up to around 20x leverage, whereas new intraday options products can provide leverage of 80 to 300 times. It sounds intimidating, but precisely because there is no liquidation mechanism, the risk becomes more controllable. Your maximum loss is just the premium paid for the option, and there’s no chance of instant liquidation anymore.

**New gameplay with options design**

Recently launched 0DTE (Zero Days to Expiration) options have introduced an interesting innovation — locking the strike price with the market price, simplifying traders’ decision-making process. You no longer need to guess both the price movement magnitude and time decay; just determine whether the underlying asset will go up or down. This is especially friendly for highly volatile assets like Solana.

Imagine during Solana’s intense fluctuations, you use intraday options to quickly judge the direction without worrying about time decay and precise strike prices. This is much more intuitive than managing complex leverage with perpetual contracts.

**The substantive difference in capital efficiency**

Perpetual contracts require you to maintain a certain margin, and if volatility increases, you need to top up urgently. Options involve a one-time premium payment, with no additional costs afterward, making capital efficiency calculations clearer. Especially when deploying both long and short positions, options allow you to allocate more directions with the same capital or achieve the same risk exposure with less capital.

Of course, options are not a silver bullet. But for traders who want to profit from directional moves in high-volatility crypto markets while avoiding extreme risks, this tool is definitely worth understanding carefully. After all, surviving is more important than earning quickly.