Digital 100s are the modern retail label for an old idea: a fixed-payout, binary-style derivative that resolves to either a full payout (100) or nothing (0) depending on a yes/no outcome at expiry. The simplicity of the payoff, a single event, a defined strike and a short expiry, is what made these products popular with casual traders and what also made them attractive to unscrupulous sellers: the bet-like structure is easy to explain, easy to gamify and easy to misprice. Established exchanges and legitimate derivatives educators describe digital or “binary” options as contracts that deliver a fixed payment if an underlying is above (or below) a strike at expiry; brokers sometimes package and brand those contracts as “Digital 100s,” “digis,” “sprint” markets or similar.
Who offers Digital 100s and where you will find them
Large multi-asset brokers that historically sold short-dated binary products have rebranded or relabelled essentially the same economic instrument; examples include major firms that at various times offered “Digital 100s” as a named product and smaller specialist platforms that continue to provide binary-style contracts. Some regulated brokers provided Digital 100s to professional clients or via specific legal entities while withdrawing them from retail offer in jurisdictions that tightened rules; others continued to offer similar payoffs via synthetic indices or bespoke options. Because the product can be implemented in many ways (exchange-listed securitised binaries, OTC option contracts, or platform-hosted betting markets), you will see the label in a range of places, regulated multi-asset brokers, derivative exchanges’ “digital” desks, and smaller offshore or unregulated platforms.
You can find and compare Digital 100s brokers by visiting Broker Listings. A website designed to make it easy to compare different brokers with each other. Choose to browse the key data for two different brokers on the same page. It makes it easy to compare their features line by line. To make sure that the key features that you are looking for are provided by the broker you choose. There are other websites that make a similar service but I think BrokerListings.com does its best.
The regulatory backdrop you must understand first
Regulators in several major markets concluded that retail sale of short-dated binary products caused disproportionate consumer harm and have restricted or banned them. The UK’s Financial Conduct Authority, for example, imposed a permanent ban on the sale, marketing and distribution of binary options to retail consumers in 2019 after concluding the products were inherently harmful for typical retail users. That ban and similar regulatory moves in other jurisdictions mean that a broker offering Digital 100s to “retail” clients in a jurisdiction where the sale is prohibited is either operating through a different legal entity or is targeting customers in ways that may not be compliant with local rules. Legal status therefore matters as much as the marketing: a platform that offers Digital 100s but is not clear about the legal entity, the regulated status, and the client segmentation it applies is a high-risk counterparty for a retail buyer.
How brokers typically structure and price Digital 100s
Brokers implement Digital 100s via three practical routes: as exchange-listed securitised binaries, as OTC option contracts written by the platform, or as pooled betting-style markets. The economic result is similar, the customer pays a stake and, if the specified event occurs at expiry, receives a fixed payout — but the plumbing changes everything. An exchange-listed securitised contract has clearing, standardized settlement and transparent pricing; an OTC or platform contract depends on the broker’s own quoting algorithm, the liquidity of the pool and the firm’s willingness to hedge or internalise risk. Pricing is not simply “market price” in many offerings: implied probabilities, house vig, one-way pricing and asymmetric expiry matching can make the effective edge against the buyer materially larger than the headline payout suggests. You must therefore treat quoted implied probability and payout as marketing points unless the broker discloses the exact pricing formula and the method by which winners are paid (pool, hedge, or principal).
Execution, settlement and operational differences that matter to traders
Because Digital 100s are short-dated and resolution happens at a precise instant, small differences in timestamping, price source and execution queueing materially change outcomes. Two otherwise identical brokers can produce different results on the same trade: one may time expiry to an exchange close or an index settlement window, another to the platform’s internal snapshot; one may allow “last tick” rounding advantages to the house, another may settle to a public reference price. For someone evaluating brokers, it is not enough to know the headline payout, you need to know the reference price, the exact expiry timestamp (and its timezone), how the platform handles stale ticks or disconnections at expiry, and whether the broker publishes a filled audit trail for resolved contracts. Where the contract is implemented OTC, ask how the broker hedges and whether the pool has sufficient backstop liquidity in all resolution states.
Principal risks — product design, execution and counterparty
The risks cluster into three groups. First, product risk: Digital 100s have an embedded house edge and a payoff that encourages high-frequency, high-turnover behaviour that is effectively gambling for most retail players. Second, execution and settlement risk: the short expiry and precise resolution make platform reliability and timestamp integrity critical; minor differences in snapshot methodology can flip wins into losses. Third, counterparty and fraud risk: a broker that prices Digital 100s but does not clearly segregate client funds, that operates out of an opaque legal entity, or that uses difficult-to-withdraw rails raises the chance that you will be unable to extract funds or that you will face aggressive “recovery” or “escrow” fraud if something goes wrong. Regulators and enforcement agencies continue to warn that binary-style products are a frequent vector for fraud, and victims of initial scams are often targeted with follow-on fund-recovery scams. That historic pattern is why many consumer authorities treat any unsolicited or high-pressure offer of binary-style contracts as a red flag.
How to vet a broker that offers Digital 100s — the practical checks
Start by establishing the legal facts: which legal entity will hold your account, which regulator (if any) governs that entity, and whether the broker is permitted to offer binary-style products to clients in your jurisdiction. Don’t accept marketing copy alone, check the regulator register for the named legal entity. Next, inspect the contract specification in detail: the reference price/source, the exact expiry rule, allowable trade sizes, maximum payouts, and the procedures for outages or disputed settlement. Then run an operational trial: open a small funded account, use the broker’s demo and real accounts to place the same trade and compare fills and timestamped settlement, and place a small withdrawal request to verify the cash-out process. Finally evaluate customer support responsiveness and the firm’s published complaint and dispute resolution process; if the broker refuses plain questions about the parity of demo and live fills, or about who hedges the risk, treat that as a governance failure. These checks separate a transparent, regulated operator from a marketing operation that relies on product opacity.
Red flags that should make you walk away immediately
There are behavioural and technical red flags you should not ignore. High pressure for immediate deposits, requests to fund via non-standard rails (gift cards, unregulated crypto wallets), opaque legal entity disclosure, deposit-to-demo gating (demo only available after deposit), very large advertised payouts that come with complex withdrawal conditions, and any offer that requires you to install remote-access software or to reveal one-time passwords are all strong signals of risk. Equally, a broker that markets Digital 100s to retail clients in a jurisdiction where the product is banned or restricted is operating at best in a regulatory grey area; at worst it is deliberately circumventing protections. If you have suffered a loss, beware that third parties offering “recovery” for an upfront fee are usually scammers; report first to your payment provider, Action Fraud or the relevant regulator and preserve evidence rather than paying a supposed recovery specialist.
Where Digital 100s can make economic sense — but rarely for a typical retail buyer
There are narrow, controlled situations where a structured fixed-payout contract can form part of a legitimate hedging or high-skill trading toolkit: professional desks trading bespoke exotics may use binary payoffs to express tight probability views and will do so inside regulated clearing and with explicit hedges. For an unsophisticated retail buyer, however, the expected return after house edge, fees and the behavioural tendency to overtrade usually makes these products a poor long-term wealth building tool. If you are technically competent, have a disciplined, pre-tested strategy, and trade only through a fully transparent, regulated legal entity that publishes clear settlement rules and provides audited proof of client segregation, then a small, experimental allocation may be justifiable, but treat it as entertainment-grade risk capital, not as an investment.
Safer alternatives to taking exposure with a Digital 100s broker
If your goal is directional exposure to equities, FX or indices without the structural downsides of Digital 100s, consider buying the underlying asset, using a regulated CFD with transparent margin and negative balance protection where available, or using exchange-listed options where clearing, margin and settlement are standardised. For small, frequent bets on volatility, a low-cost, diversified approach via an ETF or a structured product offered by a regulated institution usually reduces counterparty and execution risk dramatically. When you prefer short-dated bets for hedging a precise risk, consult a regulated derivatives desk that can provide cleared, bespoke options with documented settlement mechanics rather than a platform-hosted binary.
This article was last updated on: January 15, 2026