Octav Founder Shares His DeFi Playbook: Options, Uniswap LPs, and Tokenized Stocks

Octav founder Matthew Burry says the company began as an asset-tracking and tax-reporting tool after he found DeFi activity difficult to track under Canada’s complex tax system. He left Zapper in 2022, citing a lack of clear direction, and built a tool for his own assets. Octav has since developed data services for asset managers and family offices, including Consensys, and supplies DeFi position and transaction data to tax platforms. Burry sees tokenized stocks as a way to make retail assets such as Nvidia shares more useful as collateral, especially when combined with options and on-chain infrastructure.

Octav provided Uniswap liquidity for tokenized Tesla and S&P 500 assets soon after launch. Burry says about $200,000 in liquidity earned roughly $75,000–$80,000 over two weeks, as price differences between Realto and Uniswap routed arbitrage trades through Octav’s pools. The returns did not persist: Octav later withdrew liquidity when competing pools offered lower fees and its returns fell. The episode illustrates both the potential income from early liquidity provision and how quickly an advantage can disappear as competition changes pool economics.

Burry says options are harder to support in Uniswap-style automated market makers because liquidity must be organized across strike prices and expiries. He credits Derive’s market makers with helping make on-chain options viable, and says he has used the protocol since its Lyra era. For hedging LP exposure, he prefers options to perpetual shorts: an option’s premium is fixed and it has no liquidation risk, whereas a perpetual short can face liquidation and variable funding rates. Octav uses a traditional stock broker to buy options against tokenized-stock exposure in Robinhood-chain LP positions. In his example, a $100 option premium against $150 in market-making returns leaves $50 net while reducing potential losses.

Burry’s Uniswap V3 and V4 approach is to use wide price ranges, collect fees, and sell those fees while keeping the core position. He says his typical range is roughly 200% above and 66% below the entry price, compared with ranges of about 100% above and 60% below that he says others commonly use. A wide range can help keep a position earning fees across more price movement, but does not prevent the provider from ending up with the asset if its price falls. Octav moved its activity from Base to Robinhood for the time being, using a traditional broker for stock-option hedges and Hyperliquid and Derive for other hedging and trading. Robinhood Chain had been active for about six or seven weeks; Burry said Octav could return to Base or another chain if opportunities such as cross-chain price differences emerge.

Burry describes Derive as a revenue-generating options-market leader, estimating it accounts for 90–95% of on-chain options activity, with Paradex next. He expects four or five additional options projects to capture some share as the market grows. He also views Paradex as a secondary investment, citing its proactive team and stock options, which Derive does not offer. In Tactical’s comparison, Paradex often showed a better premium when it could quote, though Burry said incentives or a willingness to pay for trading flow might explain the difference. He cautions that valuing tokens is difficult without a price-to-equity metric and that dilution complicates fully diluted valuation comparisons. He reassesses whether a project merits more investment near a $1 billion fully diluted valuation, and advises cutting losers and adding to winners rather than doing the reverse.

To get similar Derive price exposure with less capital, Burry says an investor could sell about 66% of a 100,000-token spot position and use the remaining 33% to open a 3x long, while managing liquidation risk carefully. He says he sold some Derive, opened a 3x long, and used the proceeds to buy Dime, treating Paradex as potential beta to Derive while acknowledging either project could fail. Octav also built Tactical after its developers struggled to understand options strategies, including hedging a Uniswap position on Derive. The product lets users inspect and copy traders’ options positions at a different size, but copied trades may not work or make money; Burry says it remains small, and using multiple chains complicates onboarding because users need funds on both chains to receive quotes.