How Will Crypto Markets Move After $16B in Bitcoin Options Expire Today?

Bitcoin options worth roughly $15.9 billion are set to expire on Deribit at 8:00 AM UTC today, covering about 184,000 BTC contracts.

The expiry comes with the OG crypto trading near $84,000 after retreating from an eight-month high above $87,000, putting recent price gains against a large options settlement.

The Friday Expiry By the Numbers

An expiry snapshot earlier in the week showed the Bitcoin batch carried a notional value near $15.9 billion, a max pain price of $75,000 and a put/call ratio of 0.69. Max pain is the strike where the largest amount of options value would expire worthless.

A put/call ratio below 1 means there are more call contracts than puts. That can point to a mildly bullish positioning or hedging bias, but it does not establish where Bitcoin will trade after expiry.

Deribit CEO Luuk Strijers also posted around the same time that options open interest had climbed above $50 billion, representing about 74% of market open interest, and about one-third of that OI was due to expire during the Friday cycle.

Large butterfly trades have also appeared around October expiry dates, with some of the biggest structures targeting $95,000 for October 30, and they include short-dated calls intended to finance the trades.

Deribit’s own expiry alert, posted later on September 24, put the BTC expiry at about $14.4 billion in notional value, with a 0.84 put/call ratio and $78,000 max pain.

There was another $2.13 billion from Ethereum, bringing the combined BTC and ETH expiry to about $16.53 billion, with the different figures showing how quickly options positions can change as expiry approaches.

The expiry also comes after changes to Deribit’s trading infrastructure, with the platform rolling out a 10-millisecond speed bump on its Bitcoin and Ethereum perpetual futures and published figures from a matching engine overhaul, cutting median latency from 4.7 milliseconds to 76 microseconds.

Bitcoin Heads Into Expiry After Volatile Week

The primary cryptocurrency has had a rough end to the week after an otherwise strong run. As CryptoPotato reported earlier, it dropped to $75,000 last Wednesday before rallying past $80,000 into the weekend, climbing to $87,000 by Monday, and topping that mark again on Wednesday morning before a rejection pulled it back under $84,000.

At the time of writing, it had gone back above $84,000 by a couple of hundred bucks, according to data from CoinGecko, representing a slight 0.1% drop in 24 hours, although it managed to keep its gains for the week at about 10%, also jumping 7% across the last 30 days.

However, it is still 25% lower than where it had been a year ago and is stuck 33% below its record high of over $126,000.