Bitcoin's Quarterly Expiry Settles With Totals From $14B to $16B

Deribit settled its September quarterly bitcoin options at 08:00 UTC on Friday, and the figures never converged. Readings published this week run from $14 billion to $16 billion of notional value for bitcoin contracts alone. Bitcoin itself went in just above $84,000, flat over the previous 24 hours after slipping under that level on Wednesday. The book was weighted heavily to calls, and the strike where most contracts would have expired worthless sat some $8,000 below spot. CME's September bitcoin futures settle at 15:00 UTC, so Friday carries two settlements.

Five totals, no reconciliation

$14 billion, CoinDesk's Friday live blog, with heavy call positions at the $85,000 strike.
About $15 billion, Bitcoin Magazine, described as over a third of Deribit's open interest.
$15.6 billion, Decrypt on Wednesday and a KuCoin flash, both on roughly 182,000 BTC of contracts, 106,200 calls against 75,900 puts.
$15.9 billion, CoinDesk on Wednesday, plus $2.1 billion of ether options for about $18 billion combined.
$16 billion, CryptoSlate, with calls near 60% of open interest, or some $9.6 billion.

Not one of those accounts states the moment its number was taken. Open interest keeps moving until settlement, which would explain much of the spread. No outlet offers it. CoinDesk's Wednesday piece put the bitcoin expiry at 37% of Deribit's outstanding BTC open interest of about $43.5 billion.

Where the book sat against spot

The level that matters most to dealers is max pain, the strike at which the largest notional expires worthless. CoinDesk put it at $75,000 on Wednesday. Decrypt, KuCoin and Bitcoin Magazine put it at $76,000. Either way it sat thousands of dollars under Friday's price. That left most puts underwater and a majority of calls in the money: CoinDesk had 55% of $9.4 billion in calls with intrinsic value, about a third of the whole book.

Positioning pointed one way, with small differences in the decimals. The put-call ratio reads 0.69 at CoinDesk, 0.70 at Bitcoin Magazine and 0.71 at Decrypt and KuCoin. The single heaviest strike was $70,000, carrying both the largest block of calls at 8,705 BTC and the largest block of puts at 7,653 BTC, on Decrypt's strike-by-strike count. Call concentrations above spot sit at $85,000, $90,000 and $100,000 in Bitcoin Magazine's list; CoinDesk's adds $95,000.

August is the comparison to hand

The 28 August expiry is the nearest precedent, and it passed quietly. Cointribune counted 81,700 contracts worth $6.44 billion, split 44,639 calls to 37,061 puts, with nearly 62% expiring worthless. Max pain then sat at $68,000 to $70,000, and bitcoin traded around $79,000 before settlement and between $78,600 and $81,300 after it.

"Notional value and max pain price alone cannot forecast BTC's next direction," the Cointribune analysis said.

On the lowest Friday reading, this expiry is more than twice the size of that one. That arithmetic is ours; no account draws the comparison.

The demand behind the week

Spot ETFs have gone from a hole to a surplus. CoinDesk reported on Friday that US spot bitcoin funds have turned a $5.8 billion net outflow position in July into roughly $800 million of net inflows for the year, on SoSoValue data, after six consecutive days of buying worth $2.84 billion. That streak trails two earlier six-day runs, $2.35 billion in February 2024 and $4.73 billion in November 2024. The size of the hole is not agreed: news.bitcoin.com frames the same reversal as a $4.6 billion rebound and coinbino writes $5.7 billion. The three figures do not reconcile. The $999 million taken in on 21 September sits inside the streak.

Macro pressure eased into the settlement. The 10-year Treasury yield slipped two basis points to 5.17% on Friday, after more than 20 basis points of increase across the two previous sessions had pushed bitcoin under $84,000. Breadth was the day's better signal: 93 of the CoinDesk 100 constituents were higher, Quant up 39% and ONDO up 27%, while most large caps moved less than 2%. Hedges tied to the expired contracts now unwind or roll into October and December, and the open question is whether spot buyers replace that flow once the dealers stop.