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Consolidated cross-venue book and quote dispersion
Best bid and best offer for each contract across every venue we collect, with the venue named on each side, plus how far apart those venues are quoting the same contract. This is not what /options/chain returns. The chain’s bid and ask come from the aggregated row, which is based on a single venue. This endpoint is the genuine best-of, and by construction its spread is never wider than any individual venue’s.
Read this as execution quality, not as a dislocation scanner. Across the liquid band, cross-venue implied-vol dispersion sits inside the tightest single venue’s own spread roughly 70% of the time, so for the typical contract there is nothing to capture. What the endpoint answers well is where to execute and what it costs.

Scope

Computed only for contracts inside the liquid band: 0.85 to 1.15 moneyness, 2 or more days to expiry. Outside that band implied vol stops carrying information. Deep-ITM contracts have almost no vega, so a trivial price difference reads as tens of vol points. Before the band was applied, the widest apparent “dislocation” in a live run was 52 vol points on a 60,000 strike with spot at 77,600, which is an artefact rather than a signal. Contracts quoted by a single venue are omitted, since every field here is a comparison. A symbol with no multi-venue coverage returns 404 rather than an empty list, because an empty list reads as “spreads are zero”.

Units

All prices are coin-denominated, and the response states this in price_unit. Most venues publish option premium in USD or USDT; those are converted at ingest. Deribit quotes its linear (USDC-settled) assets in USD and is converted the same way, while its BTC and ETH options are inverse and already coin- denominated. Do not infer the unit from magnitude: comparing an unconverted USD premium against a coin premium is exactly how a spread of -195% gets published.

Reading the fields

boolean
true only when two different venues make the top of book. When false, one venue is best on both sides, so the spread shown is that venue’s own and there is no consolidation benefit to report.
boolean
true when both sides come from a deep venue (Deribit, Bybit, OKX, Binance). When false the best price is coming from a thinner venue. Still worth seeing, but not a number to lean on.
boolean
A negative spread: one venue bidding above another’s offer. Reported, never hidden, but excluded from median_spread_pct so the headline is not dragged below what trading actually costs.
boolean
The same idea on the implied-vol axis: best bid vol above best ask vol, evaluated only between deep venues.
boolean
The comparison spans both settlement conventions. Deribit’s BTC and ETH options are inverse (coin-settled); the USDC venues are linear. Implied vol is comparable across the two to first order, but part of any gap flagged this way is numeraire rather than volatility.
A crossed market is an observation, not an opportunity. Venue quote timestamps are collection times rather than exchange quote times, so a stale quote on the thinner venue cannot be ruled out. Measured crossings are small, short-dated and consistently one-directional, which points at structural causes (settlement, index, funding) rather than anything capturable. Treat crossed and book_crossed as venue-quality signals.

Coverage

Venue coverage is not uniform, and the response tells you which venues actually contributed via venues per contract and coverage.venues overall. A venue takes part in whichever comparison it actually supplied inputs for. Venues missing an input are omitted rather than zero-filled, since a zero would read as a dislocation. BTC and ETH have the deepest coverage. SOL is thinner. Single-venue markets return no rows at all.

See also

Options chain

Venues

Authorizations

X-API-Key
string
header
required

Your BackQuant API key (same key as v1)

Headers

X-API-Key
string | null

Query Parameters

symbol
enum<string>
default:BTCUSDT

Trading symbol: BTCUSDT, ETHUSDT, SOLUSDT, or HYPEUSDT.

Available options:
BTCUSDT,
ETHUSDT,
SOLUSDT,
HYPEUSDT
expiries
string | null

Comma-separated expiry tokens, e.g. 26DEC25,27MAR26.

option_type
enum<string> | null

Restrict to calls or puts.

Available options:
call,
put
crossed_only
boolean
default:false

Return only contracts where best bid vol exceeds best ask vol. Read the note on crossed above before acting on this.

sort
enum<string>
default:spread_pct

Ordering for the returned contracts.

Available options:
spread,
spread_pct,
dispersion,
strike
limit
integer
default:200

Max contracts returned.

Required range: 1 <= x <= 1000

Response

Successful Response