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Looks like Lighter is adding SPAN-style portfolio margin, set to launch with vanilla options Today Lighter calculates each position's margin on its own and adds them up. On the Q3 investor call, @vnovakovski said the new engine looks at spot, perps and options on the same asset together and asks "what the worst realistic loss would be if the market moved sharply." It revalues the book across moves in price and implied vol. That's the logic of SPAN, the method CME uses for futures and options Without portfolio margin, an options market maker posts margin on both legs: the options it sells, as if they were naked, and the perps that hedge them. Margined together, the two legs have a smaller worst case, and as Vlad put it, a smaller worst case means less margin. The market maker could then quote tighter and deeper, and a trader buying a single call gets those quotes too For a regular trader this would make hedging pay. Selling calls on ETH you already hold stops tying up margin like a naked short. Buying a put under a long perp lowers your margin and moves your liquidation further away, instead of only costing premium Institutions compare venues on how much capital a book ties up there. At CME, options desks are already margined on scenarios, and Vlad said professional trading shops run options books this way. On a venue that margins every leg alone, the same hedged book ties up several times the capital, so a desk keeps its size elsewhere. With SPAN-style margin, Lighter would charge a book for the risk it actually carries, the way CME does, and that's what it would take for the firms that dominate options to trade there once Lighter is live in the US