How Will Markets React When $2B Bitcoin Options Expire Today?

Around 25,000 Bitcoin options contracts will expire on Friday, May 15, with a notional value of roughly $2 billion. This event is small, so it is unlikely to have any impact on spot markets.

Crypto prices took a mid-week dip following the US inflation report, but have started to recover a little on Friday, with around $25 billion in total capitalization exiting since Monday.

Bitcoin Options Expiry

This week’s batch of Bitcoin options contracts has a put/call ratio of 0.55, meaning that there are almost twice as many sellers of longs as shorts. Max pain is around $80,000, according to Coinglass, which is a little lower than current spot prices, so some could be out of the money on expiry.

Open interest (OI), or the value or number of Bitcoin options contracts yet to expire, remains highest at the $80,000 strike price on Deribit, with $1.68 billion, but bears still have $1.2 billion in OI at $60,000. Total BTC options OI across all exchanges has been steadily climbing this month and is at $38 billion, according to Coinglass.

In addition to today’s batch of Bitcoin options, around 274,500 Ethereum contracts are also expiring, with a notional value of $625 million, max pain at $2,300, and a put/call ratio of 0.39. Total ETH options OI across all exchanges is around $7.3 billion.

Spot Market Outlook

Total capitalization is up 1.7% on the day at $2.77 trillion, and today could see some volatility as the US CLARITY Act advanced out of the Senate Banking Committee in a 15-9 bipartisan vote on Thursday. The past six weeks have seen steady gains with markets increasing by 16%.

Bitcoin recovered from its Thursday dip below $80,000 but failed to break resistance at $82,000, falling back below $81,000 again during the Friday morning Asian trading session.

There has been little recovery for Ether, which failed to break above $2,300 and has fallen back again to $2,265 at the time of writing. The altcoins are faring a little better with positive moves for XRP, Hyperliquid, Zcash, and Canton.

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