On Friday, February 20, about 30,600 Bitcoin options contracts will expire. The total notional value is around $2 billion. Notional amount is a way to measure the size of a derivative contract. It is the nominal or face value used to calculate payments. For example, if a contract has a notional amount of $1,000, this amount helps determine how much money could be paid, even though the actual cash exchanged might be different.
This expiry is a little smaller than last week’s, so most traders think there won’t be a big move in the actual price of Bitcoin right now. In the world of finance, a move means a noticeable change in price. If a market is calm, we say it is flat or not moving much. For the spot market, this means the current price at which Bitcoin is buying and selling today is not changing quickly.
Right now, the overall crypto market is in what experts call a bear market. A bear market means prices have been falling or staying very low for a period of time. But in the last week, prices and trading activity have been quiet. Trading volume, which is how much money changes hands, has been low, and price swings have been smaller than usual. This calm vibe can last a few days or longer in markets like cryptocurrency.
Bitcoin Options Expiry
This week’s batch of Bitcoin options contracts has a put/call ratio of 0.59. A put is a bet that the price will fall, while a call is a bet that the price will rise. The put/call ratio compares how many puts there are to how many calls. A ratio under 1 means there are more calls than puts, which can show bullish (optimistic) sentiment in the market. A ratio over 1 would show more puts than calls, which could mean bearish sentiment. The exact ratio of 0.59 suggests traders are leaning toward more bets that Bitcoin will rise, but not strongly so. Put/call ratio is the name of this measure.
Max pain is a concept used by traders to describe the price where the most option holders will lose money at expiry. In this case, the max pain is around $70,000. This price level is higher than Bitcoin’s current spot price, so many options will finish out of the money. In plain terms, those bets won’t pay off if the price stays below $70,000 at expiry. You can learn more about max pain in market discussions, but here it simply means many bets could expire worthless if Bitcoin does not reach that level.
Open interest (OI) means the total value or number of Bitcoin options contracts that have not yet expired. It shows how many bets are still alive. Right now, the highest OI is at the $60,000 strike price, with about $1.2 billion in contracts and another $1 billion at the $50,000 strike price on the Deribit exchange. Deribit is a popular place where people trade these kinds of options. The Deribit data helps show how many traders are placing bearish bets (bets that the price will fall) or bullish bets (bets that the price will rise).
Across all exchanges, the total BTC options open interest has been rising this month and sits around $36.5 billion in notional value. In simple words, many traders still have bets on Bitcoin that will not be settled today or tomorrow. Some of these bets could be settled in the coming days or weeks as the contracts reach expiry.
Analysts at Deribit noted that investors’ positioning is leaning toward more calls. In other words, more bets are on the price going up than down. They wrote, “Positioning skews call heavy across both assets, with BTC showing the stronger upside skew.” This means there is a stronger appetite for bets that Bitcoin will rise in price.
Another research firm, Laevitas, saw that downside protection is in demand. This means some traders are buying puts to protect themselves against a price drop. They observed that 2,140 BTC worth of puts at the $58,000 level were bought recently. This shows some traders want to limit losses if Bitcoin falls toward that level.
Options Expiry Alert
As of 08:00 UTC on the morning of the expiry, more than $2.4 billion in crypto options are set to expire on Deribit. For Bitcoin (BTC), the notional value is about $2.0 billion, with a put/call ratio of 0.59 and a max pain around $70,000. For Ethereum (ETH), the notional value is about $404 million, with a put/call ratio of 0.75 and a max pain around $2,050. Deribit shared these numbers in a post on Twitter.
Two hundred twelve thousand Ethereum contracts are also expiring, with a notional value of about $404 million. The max pain for Ethereum is around $2,050, and the put/call ratio is 0.75, which also shows more calls than puts but not an overwhelming tilt toward bulls. Overall, ETH options are a smaller part of the picture compared to BTC options, but they still contribute to how traders are betting on Ethereum’s price at expiry.
Across all exchanges, the total ETH options open interest is around $6.8 billion. When you add Bitcoin and Ethereum together, the total notional value of crypto options expiring today and this week comes to about $2.4 billion.
Spot Market Outlook
The broader cryptocurrency market value, or market capitalization, has been flat for the last 24 hours. It has hovered around $2.37 trillion and remains about 46% below its peak. For Bitcoin, the price has slowly moved lower this week. It touched a weekly low of about $65,700 on Thursday and then rose to around $67,290 by Friday morning in Asia. These moves show a market that is not making big jumps but also is not completely stuck in one direction.
On the price chart, resistance appears around $70,000. Resistance is a price level where the asset has a hard time rising above. If Bitcoin breaks above this level, it could rise further. Support, the price area where the market tends to stop falling, is a bit above $60,000. These levels help traders guess where prices might go next, especially around expiry dates when a lot of bets are set to end.
Ether (ETH) prices have not moved much recently and have been staying around $1,950. Other coins, often called altcoins, have also stayed flat and sit near bear market lows. In a bear market, many coins experience lower prices over an extended period. Some investors think the market could stay flat or drift slowly until new information or a new trend appears.
For readers who want to check different viewpoints, there are reports and reminders from market watchers, including a recent piece on CryptoPotato about how crypto markets could react to today’s option expiries. News like this keeps traders watching prices closely around expiry times to see if a major price move happens or if prices simply drift sideways.
In short, Friday’s expiration involves a lot of Bitcoin options, but the market looks calmer than in the past. Even with the large number of contracts, the bigger price moves are not guaranteed. Traders will watch for how Bitcoin and Ethereum behave as expiry approaches and as new information about the market comes in. If you want to see more detail on today’s data, you can visit the sources mentioned here, such as Coinglass, Deribit, Laevitas, and the official post from Deribit.
Definitions
- Bitcoin: Bitcoin is the first decentralized cryptocurrency that uses a peer-to-peer network and blockchain; created in 2009 based on a white paper by Satoshi Nakamoto.
- Open interest: Open interest is the total number of outstanding derivative contracts that have not been settled.
- Put/call ratio: Put/call ratio is a technical indicator showing the ratio of put options to call options purchased, used to gauge investor sentiment.
- Notional amount: Notional amount is the nominal or face amount used to calculate payments on a financial derivative, which typically does not change over time.
- Ethereum: Ethereum is a decentralized blockchain platform with smart contract functionality; Ether (ETH) is its native cryptocurrency.
Source notes and definitions help explain terms used in this report. To read more on each term, you can visit the linked Wikipedia pages.
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