Pulse
Volatility Has a Pattern.
About
The problem it solves Crypto options markets have matured fast. Onchain options volume now reaches billions in monthly notional, and protocols like Thetanuts already provide the core infrastructure: strikes, expiries, vaults, and yield strategies. From a technical standpoint, the market works. The problem is not access — it is reaction time. In liquid options markets, pricing inefficiencies are extremely short-lived. Implied volatility can shift 5–15% within minutes, skew imbalances appear and disappear in under 30 seconds, and yield opportunities are quickly arbitraged away. For human traders, this creates a structural disadvantage: by the time they analyze the data, the opportunity is already gone. Today, traders are forced to manually interpret fragmented signals: - IV charts in one tab - skew tables in another - price action and yield metrics elsewhere This cognitive load makes consistent, real-time decision-making almost impossible, even for experienced traders. Protocols like Thetanuts expose raw options primitives, but they do not explain what matters right now. Traders see data, not decisions. As a result, most users either react too late or avoid options entirely due to complexity and timing risk. Pulse solves this by acting as a real-time intelligence layer on top of Thetanuts. Instead of asking users to analyze charts and Greeks, Pulse continuously monitors live onchain options data and detects statistically meaningful deviations, not surface-level price movement. When an opportunity appears, users see a clear, time-bound signal — not abstract metrics. What users interact with is: - volatility crush alerts - mispriced options signals - yield anomalies - momentum-based setups All already filtered, timed, and executable through Thetanuts. Pulse does not make users learn options first. It allows them to act correctly before the market reprices. This problem only exists onchain: - data is public and composable - execution is permissionless - settlement is instant Pulse doesn’t replace traders. It removes the latency between market behavior and human action.
How it's made
Challenges we ran into One major challenge was signal noise. Onchain options data fluctuates constantly, and early versions of Pulse produced too many alerts that were statistically insignificant. We solved this by introducing rolling baselines and deviation thresholds, ensuring signals only trigger on structural market shifts, not random volatility. Another challenge was balancing real-time accuracy with performance. Polling data too frequently caused UI lag, while slower updates killed timing precision. We addressed this by batching critical metrics and refreshing them every two seconds, allowing Pulse to remain responsive without missing short-lived opportunities. Finally, not every detected signal was immediately executable. Some opportunities failed due to liquidity depth or strike availability on Thetanuts. To fix this, we added a validation layer that checks protocol constraints before surfacing any signal, ensuring every alert users see can be acted on instantly.