Friday’s Bitcoin options expiry is one of the biggest events on the crypto market this year. Although the numbers seem to favor the bulls at first glance, market structure and the behavior of major players suggest that the real risk lies below $90,000.
Read also: IBIT investors are losing money
Lack of upward momentum, volatility on the rise
Bitcoin has been trading in a narrow price range for several weeks. Repeated attempts to return above $95,000 have failed, while the $87,000 area is acting as a short-term safety net. It is in this environment that options worth $10.8 billion are expiring, with the Deribit exchange once again playing a major role with its dominant market share.
Covered call strategies prevail in the market, which at first glance look like massive bets on growth to $100,000. In reality, however, it is often not a belief in sharp growth, but rather a systematic collection of premiums. The profit from these strategies is limited, and their success depends more on price stagnation than on a rally.
You may also like: Millionero review
Call options as an illusion of optimism
A closer look at the option chains shows that the real optimism is much weaker than the headlines suggest. Only less than 17% of call options have a strike price below $92,500. If Bitcoin stays in its current range of around $87,000–88,000, most call options will expire worthless.
Also interesting are call options well below the current price, for example at $70,000. However, these do not serve as simple speculation on a decline, but are part of more complex on-chain and option structures that ordinary retailinvestors do not usually use due to high costs.
On the put option side, the situation is significantly different. In the range between $86,000 and $100,000, put options hold a volume of approximately $1.2 billion, which significantly strengthens the position of bears. The key threshold is thus $90,000 – below which sellers gain the upper hand. If Bitcoin closes Friday’s expiration between $86,000 and $88,000, the net result would favor bearish positions by approximately $775 million. The market is thus facing a sensitive moment where even a relatively small price movement could determine who will take the largest slice of the pie from the option settlement.
Don’t miss out: FX Junction
