What Obsidian is

Obsidian is a decentralized options trading protocol on Arbitrum. Writers lock collateral in a vault and mint an ERC-721 option NFT representing the contract. Buyers pay a premium to acquire the NFT, giving them the right to exercise at the strike price until expiry. Everything — writing, buying, exercising, chaining, cancelling, settling — happens on-chain. No operator can front-run, freeze, or rehypothecate your collateral.

The pieces

Obsidian ships several branded primitives. They layer on top of a single vault contract, so a position written on one surface can be sold, flash-exercised, or chained from any of the others.

• ▸Book — bid/ask order book for options.
• ▸Mantle — flash-loan liquidity pools that power zero-capital exercise.
• ▸Magma — overcollateralized borrowing market (USDC, WETH, WBTC, etc.).
• ▸Prism — Uniswap-v3-style concentrated liquidity pair DEX.
• ▸Obelisk — StableSwap pool for low-slippage stable trades.
• ▸Forge — strategy builder that chains options to free up collateral.
• ▸Eruption — flash-powered exercise for ITM options with zero capital.
• ▸Quarry — OBS rewards distributed per block to active option writers.

Custody model

Every collateral asset is held by the ObsidianOptionsVault contract, never by a treasury wallet. The contract holds your underlying for a call or your strike-currency for a put, returns it when the option expires worthless, or swaps it with the buyer when exercised. The platform fee is a small spread on the premium — never a cut of your collateral.

Why NFT options

Because options are non-fungible by nature — strike, expiry, amount, and writer are unique per contract — ERC-721 is the correct standard. It also means your options are transferable: list them on Obsidian's internal marketplace, move them to another wallet, or chain them with Forge to rebuild into a more capital-efficient shape.