Derive cites Celestia for V3 scale, custody and data availability
Derive says its V3 upgrade is designed to handle much larger onchain options activity while keeping user funds withdrawable if its operator goes offline, and it is leaning on Celestia to publish the data needed to reconstruct exchange state. In a case study published by Celestia on 23 October 2026, Derive said it accounts for about 95% of onchain options premium volume and has processed more than $40 billion in cumulative notional volume.
Evidence and context
The case study describes Derive as an onchain options exchange for professional traders, market makers and funds, with support for options, perpetual futures and block trades through a request-for-quote system. It says the V3 architecture delivers an order-of-magnitude increase in throughput, Ethereum-native custody, validity-proven state and an L1 escape hatch, while also simplifying product launches. The source says V3 is split into four layers, but does not enumerate those layers in the excerpt provided.
Celestia says Derive has used its network since January 2024 and had published 43,082 blobs and 42.52 GiB into its namespace as of 23 October 2026. Derive CTO Josh Kim is quoted as saying Celestia offers “the highest potential scale, economic predictability and infrastructure maturity,” and that integrating Celestia’s client into its zkVM program was simpler than expected. Those remarks are attributed to the case study, not independently verified here.
According to the case study, Derive relies on Celestia because fees have been more predictable than alternative data availability providers, whose costs can fluctuate with congestion. It also says Celestia recently upgraded to Fibre and now advertises 150 MB/s of mainnet throughput, with a separate benchmark cited at 3 Tb/s. The report argues that gives Derive room to scale V3 without running into data-layer limits in the near term.
The security model remains important. Background material supplied with the source notes that Derive uses Ethereum contracts to hold collateral and verify proofs, while state changes are published to Celestia; matching remains offchain and settlement is executed through a zero-knowledge virtual machine with cryptographic proofs verified on Ethereum. The same material also notes that the escape-hatch mechanism depends on governance and security-council assumptions, so it should not be read as removing all operational or governance risk.
The latest company update in the supplied material says Derive V3 went live on 7 October 2026, while a separate Derive Insights article on 8 October 2026 said the platform is scaling to trillions. No next catalyst date was supplied in the Celestia case study itself.