An options book supplies three things a perpetual market cannot. Losing it is not a uniform degradation — each one fails differently.
1. A forward price for movement
Implied volatility is the market’s price for movement over a defined future window. Nothing in spot or perpetual data expresses that; those describe now and the recent past.
No substitute. Realised volatility can be measured, and it is backward-looking by construction — measuring realised volatility. You can estimate what the range has been, never what the market is charging for what it will be. This is the loss with no workaround.
2. A hedging obligation to locate
Gamma exists because someone must trade the underlying as price moves. No book, no obligation, no walls — and inventing them is the error in reading dealer positioning on altcoins.
Partial substitute. The liquidation structure is also a map of forced flow, mechanically triggered, and it can be estimated. Less precise and genuinely analogous: both answer “who has to trade, and where”.
3. Direction of concern
Skew says which tail is being paid up for, which is different from which way price has moved.
Partial substitute. Funding says which side is paying to hold. It measures crowding rather than fear, so it is a cruder instrument aimed at a similar question.
What you keep
Everything about leverage and everything about liquidity: open interest, funding, liquidation positioning, and the whole on-chain read. For most coins that is the majority of what actually moves them, which is why the leverage layer is not a consolation prize.
The point
Say which reading is unavailable rather than rendering a thinner version of it. A dashboard that draws the same panels for every coin is claiming a completeness it does not have.