Bitcoin futures and options exchange Deribit today released a statement regarding their position on the Bitcoin fork situation. The derivatives exchanges stated, “Due to recent discussions about a potential upcoming hard fork, we decided to come with a statement how this hard fork or any other hard fork in the future would be handled by Deribit.”
The statement follows in their own words:
For all existing contracts and expiration dates, Deribit Futures and Options will settle on the value of BTC and the forked chain (BTC + BTU). In this case, the forked chain will be called BTU (Bitcoin Unlimited).
Deribit might need time to implement the new index for those contracts, which would simply be adding the BTU index to the BTC index. During this period trading might be suspended if Deribit sees the necessity to do so.
BTC will be used for calculating profits and losses at expiration.
As for BTC balances on Deribit: we will distribute the amount of BTU whatever your BTC balance will be at the time of the split (cash BTC balance).
Withdrawals will be temporarily disabled during the fork when double spending and replay attacks are a serious risk.
Profit payouts will be simply calculated in BTC. A short example should clarify:
Imagine trader is long 90 contracts of $10 at a price of $900, (equaling 1 BTC). Before expiry of the contracts there is a split, and now BTC is trading at $1000 and BTU is trading at $100 during expiration, and the future settles on $1000 + $100 = $1100. Now the profit for the trader is $200 dollar, which would be paid out in BTC only, thus a profit of $200 / 1000 = 0.2 BTC.
During/after the fork Deribit might suspend the creation of new expiration dates. As for any new contracts listed after the split, contracts would follow BTC, though we might add contracts for trading futures on BTU or BTU+BTC.