The short version
- Bitcoin options expiry on October 30 settled at $78,119.01 on Deribit, just $119 above the $78,000 max pain level, and 87% of the $10.4 billion in options expired worthless.
- The biggest bets, $95,000, $100,000 and $90,000 calls worth about $3.3 billion, all paid nothing; the Binance hack, not max pain, dragged BTC from $81,971 into the zone.
- The crew is watching the December 25 quarterly ($10.5 billion, max pain $75,000) and BTC at $77,215 above support at $76,264.
The Bitcoin options expiry on Friday landed almost exactly where the max pain math said it would. Deribit settled its October 30 contracts at $78,119.01, only $119 above the $78,000 max pain level, and 87% of the options in the expiry ran out worthless.
That sounds like proof that max pain works. It isn’t. On Sunday Bitcoin traded at $80,855; what took it down to $78,000 was the Binance hack on Thursday night, not market makers. So what expired, who got paid, and what comes next?
Glassnode’s read on the price after the expiry:
bitcoin:native is retesting the True Market Mean.
It could pull back all the way to the short-term holder cost basis at $75.8k and still be a good setup for continuation.
Retests like this are normal in an uptrend. The last one, in mid-September, came days before the high of
Where Did the Bitcoin Options Expiry Settle?
At $78,119.01, the delivery price Deribit published for October 30. Deribit settles on the average of its Bitcoin index from 07:30 to 08:00 UTC, so no single trade could push it.
The expiry held 133,163 BTC of options on Deribit, worth $10.4 billion at the settlement price. Calls outnumbered puts 87,868 BTC to 45,295 BTC, a put/call ratio of 0.52.
Option buyers collected $106.8 million in total. At exactly $78,000, the max pain level, they would have got $106.6 million, so the gap came to about $160,000. On a $10.4 billion expiry, buyers took home roughly 1% of the notional.
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What Expired Worthless on Friday?
The big rally bets, all of them. In our preview on Sunday, the three largest positions were calls at $95,000, $100,000 and $90,000. They stayed the largest to the end, and all three paid nothing:
- $95,000 call: 19,951 BTC, about $1.56 billion of notional
- $100,000 call: 11,284 BTC
- $90,000 call: 10,710 BTC
Calls at $90,000 or higher made up 58,711 BTC, two thirds of every call in the expiry. Only 10.8% of the calls finished in the money, all of them at strikes below $78,119.
Puts did a little better. 18% of them paid out, three quarters of them at strikes from $78,500 to $85,000 that were bought when Bitcoin still traded above $80,000. The crash insurance further down, with the biggest pile at $70,000 (4,358 BTC), expired unused.
SIDE TRAIL: Bitcoin Heads for a Second Red October
Did Max Pain Pull the Price Down?
No, the Binance hack did. Bitcoin hit $81,971 on Thursday afternoon, nearly $4,000 above max pain and less than a day before settlement. Then $6.36 billion left Binance wallets in the biggest hack in crypto history, and by midnight UTC Bitcoin was at $77,992.
So the settlement landed in the max pain zone by accident. The payout curve around it was flat anyway: anywhere from $76,000 to $80,000, buyers would have collected between $106.6 million and $110.9 million. Max pain marked a wide valley, and the hack dropped Bitcoin into the middle of it.
After the settlement the hedges came off, and the price kept sliding to $76,326 on Friday afternoon.
What Comes Next: the December 25 Quarterly Expiry
The next big one is the quarterly expiry on December 25, and it’s just as large. Deribit holds 136,126 BTC of options for that date, $10.5 billion, or 44.5% of all open Bitcoin options on the exchange. Its max pain sits at $75,000, and the put/call ratio is 0.66, more defensive than Friday’s.
The biggest single strike is the $80,000 call (7,781 BTC), followed by the $60,000 put (6,617 BTC). Traders still hold 35,763 BTC of calls at $100,000 or higher for Christmas, 44% of all its calls.
Before that, the November 27 monthly expiry holds 48,206 BTC ($3.7 billion), with max pain at $80,000.
Bitcoin Price: Where BTC Stands After the Expiry
The Bitcoin price is $77,215 at the time of writing, back under the settlement price and $4,700 below its 50-day moving average at $81,954. The first support is $76,264, with Glassnode’s short-term holder cost basis at $75,800 just under it; a daily close back above $78,119 would put the expiry flush behind it.
TRAIL MAP: Funding Rates and Open Interest Explained
Friday’s Bitcoin options expiry cleared out $10.4 billion of bets, most of them on a rally that never came. Christmas brings the same size again, with max pain $3,000 lower.
On the climb since 2017. Trades futures and reads onchain data. Automates the boring parts.
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