$15 Billion Options Expiry Tests Bitcoin Rally
Bitcoin is facing a significant quarterly options expiry on Friday, with approximately $15 billion in contracts set to expire on Deribit. This event has traders assessing whether the cryptocurrency's recent rally can continue.
The put-to-call ratio on Deribit is around 0.70, while large concentrations of call options are positioned at strike prices of $85,000, $90,000, and $100,000. Bitcoin was trading around $84,000 on Thursday, leaving it well above the roughly $76,000 max-pain level cited for the expiry.
Max pain refers to the price at which the largest number of options would expire worthless. However, Caroline Mauron, co-founder of digital-asset derivatives liquidity provider Orbit Markets, noted that hedging activity could dampen gains before the contracts expire, with momentum potentially changing after the positions are settled or rolled into later expiries.
Oliver Carding, head of marketing at Tesseract Group, cautioned that the size of the expiry alone does not determine Bitcoin's direction. He described the event instead as a positioning and roll event. Traders are also positioning beyond Friday's settlement, with some moving exposure into October and December contracts.