Exiting: exercise, sell, or expire

Every option you hold on Plume has three ways out. This is the full version — when to reach for each one, and what actually happens when you do.

Exercise: the one that's always there

Exercise is your unconditional exit. It needs no counterparty, no market depth, no cooperation from anyone else. You hold the position; you decide the moment; the contract pays you the current value straight out of the locked collateral, priced at whatever the oracle says right now.

Open your position, hit Exercise, confirm. Within moments the payout is in your wallet — stock tokens for a call, USDG for a put — for exactly the intrinsic gain your strike has earned as of that instant.

There's one small technical limit: exercise needs a recent price to work from, so if the oracle hasn't updated in the last little while — rare, but possible — the button won't fire until it does. That's a brief pause, not a lost right. The moment a fresh price lands, exercise works again, and nothing about your position changes while you wait.

Because exercising is instant and needs nobody else, it's the right move whenever you want certainty over optimization. It gives up whatever time value the option still had left. That's the one cost, and it's usually small.

Selling: usually a little better, when it's there

An option that still has days left before expiry is worth more than its intrinsic value alone, because anything could still happen. That extra bit is time value, and exercising throws it away. Selling doesn't.

If a market exists for your specific option — same asset, same strike, same expiry — you can list it for sale and let someone else take over the position. When it works, you typically walk away with a bit more than you'd have gotten exercising the same position at the same moment.

The catch is honest: this is a young market, and not every option has a buyer waiting. If there's no market yet for what you're holding, you'll see that plainly — an empty state, not a spinner pretending to look for one. In that case, exercising is still sitting right there as your guaranteed floor. Selling is the upgrade when it's available, never the only door.

Expiry: the automatic backstop

If you do nothing — no exercise, no sale — Friday handles it for you. The series settles at the official closing price, and your payout, if there is one, becomes claimable the moment settlement happens. You don't need to be watching. Anyone — not just you, not just Plume — can trigger that settlement once expiry arrives, specifically so a position never gets stuck because its owner forgot about it.

If your option finished worthless, there's nothing to claim and nothing owed — that was the maximum loss you already knew about the day you bought it.

Choosing between them

Think of it as a simple order of operations: exercise is the floor, selling is the upgrade when available, expiry is what happens if you do nothing at all. None of them is a mistake. The only genuinely wrong move is worrying that you're locked in. You're not — on any day of the week.