Deribit and SignalPlus launch The Island trading competition with $600K in rewards

Deribit and SignalPlus are putting up 600,000 USDC for their latest trading competition, a five-week event called “The Island” that runs from July 6 to August 10. It’s the biggest prize pool the two firms have offered together.

The first competition in November 2023 carried $100,000 USDC. The next, “The Summer Chase,” raised the pool to $300,000 USDC. The “Space Edition” pushed it to $450,000 USDC. Now “The Island” hits $600,000 USDC, a sixfold increase in less than two years.

The volume numbers have grown in step. The initial contest generated $1 billion in notional trading volume. Later events during 2024 exceeded $8 billion. Cumulative volume across 2025 competitions surpassed $23 billion, with individual events attracting over 1,000 traders each.

The format uses leaderboards and team challenges. Daily and weekly prize distributions create recurring incentive loops, rewarding sustained performance rather than one big winning trade.

SignalPlus provides the analytics and trading infrastructure, giving participants strategy tools and market data alongside the competitive framework. Deribit remains the dominant venue for Bitcoin and Ethereum options, and the competition series helps drive volume onto the platform.

The prize pool is distributed across multiple channels, meaning there are several ways to earn outside a winner-take-all outcome. That structure mirrors what the options market itself does: multiple strike prices, multiple expiries, multiple ways to express a view. Cumulative volume across 2025 competitions surpassed $23 billion, a figure that gives some sense of how much activity these contests can generate for the broader crypto market.