About 19,500 Bitcoin options contracts expired Friday, July 17, carrying a notional value of roughly $1.23 billion. It's a relatively small event — total crypto options expirations came in around $1.4 billion — and traders don't expect it to move spot markets much. Another 131,000 Ethereum contracts also rolled off, worth $242 million.
What the numbers show
The put/call ratio for this week's Bitcoin options sits at 0.87, meaning long and short bets are nearly balanced. Max pain — the price where the most options expire worthless — is $62,500, below where Bitcoin was trading Friday morning. Open interest is heaviest at the $70,000 strike on Deribit, with $1.6 billion, while short sellers have $1.1 billion parked at $60,000. Across all exchanges, total Bitcoin options open interest is about $30 billion.
Puts are still trading at a premium to calls across all major tenors, but the premium has become more uniform. That suggests less panic about an immediate crash. At the same time, the proportion of large-scale bullish trades increased this week, mostly short-term bull spreads.
Ethereum's different picture
Ethereum's options expiry tells a different story. The put/call ratio is 1.5 — bearish leaning. Max pain is $1,750, and total open interest across exchanges is about $4.8 billion. Ether itself dropped almost 4% from a six-week high to around $1,850 at the time of writing.
Market action this week
Crypto markets bounced to a mid-week high of $2.3 trillion total market cap but started to erode by Friday. Bitcoin fell about 2% from its intraday high of $64,800 to $63,300 during Friday morning Asian trading. The asset appears to be heading for the weekly resistance area around $62,000 — not far from the max pain level.
The timing isn't great for bulls. With the expiry out of the way, the next concrete test is whether Bitcoin can hold above $62,000 into the weekly close.
