Bitcoin options worth $11B expire near $78,000 max pain level
About $11B in bitcoin options expired on Deribit on Oct. 30 with max pain at $78,000, as BTC traded just below it after the Binance-driven sell-off.
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Hana Kimura
10/30/20262 min read
About $11 billion of bitcoin options expired on Deribit at 08:00 UTC on Friday, Oct. 30, with the max pain level of $78,000 sitting close to where bitcoin traded after a turbulent week. CryptoTicker counted 135,159 BTC options open ahead of settlement, while Deribit data relayed by PANews and ChainThink put the total at 134,000 to 135,000 contracts worth $10.5 billion to $10.9 billion, depending on the reference price.
Calls dominated positioning. CryptoTicker counted 88,715 calls against 46,445 puts, a put-to-call ratio of 0.52; other trackers cited 0.53. The largest concentration sat at the $95,000 strike with 20,152 contracts, almost all of them calls, followed by $100,000 with 11,285 and $90,000 with 10,756. With bitcoin far below those strikes, CryptoTicker estimated that about 86% of the contracts, or 116,265 options, would expire worthless.
Max pain marks the settlement price at which option buyers as a group lose the most. When CryptoTicker published its analysis on Oct. 29, bitcoin traded near $81,179, about 3.9% above that level. The Binance hack then pushed the price to an overnight low of $76,400, according to CoinDesk, leaving BTC at about $77,350 a few hours after settlement, slightly below max pain.
Puts cluster lower
Downside protection was concentrated well below spot. Around 17,592 puts were open between $69,000 and $75,000, while only about 13,500 contracts sat between $80,000 and $85,000. Demand for protection extended past the expiry: CoinDesk reported that the most-traded bitcoin option on Friday was the $74,000 put dated Nov. 13.
Ether options expired at the same time, with $750 million to $776 million in notional value, a max pain of $2,400 to $2,500 and a put-to-call ratio between 0.73 and 0.77, according to Deribit data cited by PANews and ChainThink. Ether traded near $2,220 on Friday morning.
CryptoTicker cautioned that max pain shows where option sellers' interests lie rather than serving as a price target. It noted that bitcoin fell 2% to 3% in the days after two of the last three monthly expiries, but called the sample too small to treat as a rule. Ahead of settlement, Deribit's perpetual funding rate stood at 0.0032% per eight hours, a level the outlet did not consider overheated.
Source: Deribit, CryptoTicker, PANews, ChainThink, CoinDesk