With $1.3 trillion in imaginary money traded in 2024 (enough, one might add, to finance several royal weddings or a couple of modest tsarist campaigns), Deribitâs leaders stared out their high-rise windows, sipping Turkish coffee, and considered what would happen should they bring their spectacle to the United States. Their CEO, Luuk Strijers, confessed to the Financial Times that the mood was changing â even the shadows had grown slightly less foreboding, provided one disregarded Wall Streetâs eternal skepticism and the Congressmenâs tendency to legislate as if they were writing Tolstoyan novels: complex, everlasting, and confusing to all involved.