Around 19,500 Bitcoin options contracts will expire on Friday, July 17, with a notional value of roughly $1.23 billion. This expiry is much smaller than usual events, so it is unlikely to have any impact on spot markets.

Crypto markets have gained later in the week following cooler-than-expected US inflation data, but have lost those gains by Friday.

Bitcoin Options Expiry

This week’s batch of Bitcoin options contracts has a put/call ratio of 0.87, meaning that sellers of long (call) contracts and short (put) contracts are almost evenly matched. Max pain is around $62,500, which is lower than current spot prices, so some will 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 $70,000 strike price on Deribit, with $1.6 billion, but short sellers still have $1.1 billion in OI at $60,000. Total BTC options OI across all exchanges has ticked up a little to $30 billion, according to Coinglass.

“Puts continue to trade at a premium to calls across all major tenors, although the magnitude of that premium has become increasingly uniform,” said crypto derivatives provider Greeks Live this week.

This suggests that overall, the market is less panicked about an immediate crash than before, though people still pay a bit more for “drop protection” than for “rise bets” — just not as extremely as they did recently.

“The proportion of large-scale bullish trades continued to increase this week, primarily consisting of short-term bull spreads.”

Meanwhile, Deribit said, “This floods the market with liquidity and volatility, creating prime conditions for trading short-dated options on Deribit.”

In addition to today’s tiny batch of Bitcoin options, around 131,000 Ethereum contracts are expiring, with a notional value of $242 million, a max pain of $1,750, and a put/call ratio of 1.5.

Total ETH options OI across all exchanges is low at around $4.8 billion. This brings the total notional value of crypto options expirations to around $1.4 billion, a very small event.

Spot Market Outlook

Crypto markets bounced to a mid-week high of $2.3 trillion, but those gains had started to erode by the end of the week.

Bitcoin has fallen around 2% from its intraday high of $64,800 to $63,300 during the Friday morning Asian trading session. It appears to be heading for the weekly resistance area, which is around $62,000.

Ether has also broken down from its six-week high in an almost 4% decline to around $1,850 at the time of writing.

Source: CryptoPotato