Your capital, on the quotes that trade.
Two things change when the strike grid disappears: where your capital sits, and what a resting quote actually is. Both work in your favour.
Thousands of series versus a handful of durations.
A conventional short-dated options complex spreads maker capital across thousands of strike/expiry series. Most of them are stale quote lines nobody trades.
Microtick pools that same capital into a few duration tiers. The strike of every trade is the implied price at the instant it opens, so the strike grid disappears entirely and every quote sits at the point of maximum gamma and vega relevance. Tighter markets and deeper inside size, from the same maker capital.
Positions cash-settle in USD against that same implied price by default — but that is a venue configuration, not a constraint of the model. Nothing prevents exercising into the underlying at the strike, at expiry or during the option's life, where a venue elects to support physical delivery. Cash-against-the-implied-price is simply the variant that needs no outside price at all.
A quote is a curve, not a number.
If the strike is set at the moment you trade, how can a maker have priced it already? Because a resting quote doesn't carry a price. It carries a short polynomial in the strike — the maker's own fair value expanded around an anchor, plus a markup.
The premium for whatever strike you actually get is evaluated from that curve at fill time. You don't know the number in advance. You do know the rule, and you can check it afterwards.
The premium is a function of the strike, so a moving strike reprices the quote instead of stranding it. No cancel-replace race.
The coefficients travel on the public book. Evaluate the same curve at the same strike and you get the same premium.
A markup over the maker's own fair value, earned across high turnover — posted as a ladder, so depth comes at a declining edge.
Quote it yourself.
The Evaluation Kit ships a reference market maker in TypeScript, plus load generators to see how your quotes hold up under real volume. And if you'd quote a duration tier on a live venue, that is the one thing standing between this and existing — so say so.