What is Strike
Strike is a launchpad for option markets on Solana. A creator picks an underlying equity, a side, a strike price and an expiry; the launch creates the option series, mints a fixed supply of a token that represents it, collateralises the vault behind it and opens a liquidity pool — in one transaction.
It is pump.fun for options. Instead of launching a coin with nothing behind it, you launch a market: a token whose terms are written on chain and whose value is tied to a defined option position. Strike itself launched on pump.fun.
The option leg is not hand-rolled. Strike is powered by Epicentral and its Solana Option Standard — the on-chain primitive for creating, pricing and settling options for any token on Solana. The contract is tokenised with its own metadata, collateral is non-custodial, and liquidity routes through Epicentral's Option Pools rather than a pool Strike has to bootstrap alone.
Token anatomy
Every Strike market is defined by five immutable fields, written into the series account at launch:
underlying— the equity or ETF the option is written onside—CALLorPUTstrike— the contract's strike price in USDexpiry— the contract's expiration timestampsupply— the fixed token supply, minted once
The market's token is a Token-2022 mint that carries those terms in its own metadata, so the token knows what it is and when it dies:
UNDERLYING = NVDA · TYPE = CALL · STRIKE = 180 · EXPIRY = 2026-12-18 · CONTRACT_SIZE = 1
The ticker is derived from the same fields — NVDA + 180 + C + DEC26 becomes $NVDA180C-DEC26 — so a market's terms are legible from its symbol alone, and a symbol resolves to exactly one series.
Launching
The launch flow walks through six steps: underlying, side, strike, expiry, token configuration and review. Strikes are drawn from the chain around spot, and the expiry set covers 7D, 30D, 90D, 180D and 1Y, snapped to the third Friday.
One signature does all of it. The transaction creates the Epicentral series, creates the Token-2022 mint, mints the fixed supply, opens the pool and seeds it with the creator's liquidity. Liquidity is locked for the life of the contract and unlocks at settlement.
Nothing about the market can be edited afterwards. There is no bonding curve, no graduation and no migration step — the pool is real from the first slot.
Pricing & backing
Two numbers matter on a Strike market. Price is what the market pays for the token right now. Backing is the vault's mark on the option position divided by supply — the per-token value of the contract behind it.
Spot for the underlying comes from an on-chain oracle feed, and the contract is marked against it every slot. When price trades above backing, the market is paying a premium for the exposure; when it trades below, the token is discounted to the position it holds. Both are published on every market page.
Expiry & settlement
The option token is self-expiring. Epicentral's options are American-style, so the position can be exercised before expiry when that is the better outcome; either way the token settles when its series does. If the contract finishes in the money, USDC proceeds are claimable pro rata against the supply. If it finishes worthless, the token settles at zero and the pool's remaining liquidity returns to the creator.
Settlement is mechanical and permissionless — anyone can crank it once the timestamp has passed, and the vault's collateral is what pays out.
Fees
- Launch — network fee only. Strike takes nothing to open a market; the creator supplies the liquidity.
- Swap — 1.00% of each trade, split 70/30 between the creator and the protocol.
- Settlement — 0.25% of in-the-money proceeds.
Risk
Options expire. A token backed by a contract that finishes out of the money settles at zero, and the closer an expiry gets, the faster the backing decays. Strike does not smooth this, hedge it, or roll positions — the token holds exactly the contract its terms describe, until the day they end.
Two more worth naming. A Strike token is a claim on a fully collateralised position held by the program's vault — it is not an exchange-cleared contract, and the vault is what stands behind it. And every mark on this site depends on an oracle price for the underlying; if that feed stalls, so does the backing number.
Nothing on this site is investment advice.