An Iridium option references a Hyperliquid perpetual, not the stock the perpetual tracks. That is not a shortcut. It is the reason the option can exist at all hours, and it changes three things about how the option is priced.
The forward comes from funding
A listed equity option is priced off a forward: the stock price, plus the cost of carrying the hedge to expiry (interest), minus what the hedge pays (dividends). The market maker who sells you a call buys shares and finances them.
A perp has no dividends and no financing in the usual sense. Its carry is the funding rate: every hour, longs pay shorts (or the reverse) a rate that pulls the perp back toward its reference price. A market maker who sells a call and hedges by buying the perp pays or receives that funding until expiry. So the forward for an expiry is the perp price plus the funding the hedge will cost until then.
We estimate that funding from Hyperliquid's own history: a blend of the predicted rate and a trailing average, mean-reverting over a few days toward a trimmed long-run mean. When funding is high, far-dated calls are worth more relative to puts, exactly as they would be for a stock with a high borrow cost. The forward is observable in every quote we send.
Time runs on a trading-session clock
Volatility is not spread evenly across the week. For a US stock, most of the variance happens during the session; overnight carries a smaller share and a weekend day a smaller share still. A model that counts calendar hours would price a Friday option bought on Saturday as if two full days of risk remained.
Our clock weights hours by how much variance they actually carry, measured from the perp's own history. Equities and indices run on an NYSE session clock, commodities on a futures clock, crypto on calendar time. Realized volatility is measured on the same clock it is applied on, so the surface does not drift when the market is shut.
Scheduled earnings are the exception: a known date with a known-sized jump. We price the announcement as the jump it is, so implied volatility rises into the event and falls out after it, the way the listed market behaves.
Settlement is an average, not a print
A listed option settles against an official close. A perp has no close, and a single print at an arbitrary instant is easy to push. So an Iridium option settles against the 30-minute time-weighted average of the perp's mark price ending at expiry, sampled every second.
The average is harder to move and smoother to hedge into. The hedger unwinds its position across the same window, so what the house delivers at settlement is what it has actually hedged. The samples are kept, so every settlement price can be checked after the fact.
What this is not
It is not an option on the stock. If the perp trades away from its reference, especially when the stock market is closed, the option follows the perp. The reference price in every quote and the funding term in every forward are shown precisely so that you can see when that is happening. For most of the week, on the liquid names, the perp tracks its stock to within a few basis points. For the hours when the stock market is shut and the perp is the only price there is, the perp is the market.