Bitcoin Slides Below $77,000 as Nearly $11B of Options Expire

Bitcoin's monthly options expiry settled at 08:00 UTC on Friday, and the price walked into it falling. Deribit's expiring book was sized at between $10.8 billion and about $11 billion depending on the reading, with every account agreeing on max pain of $78,000 — the strike at which the largest share of open contracts expires worthless. Bitcoin traded at $78,420 half an hour before settlement. By 9:43 a.m. in New York it was near $76,800, down about 4% on the day. The slide had started on Thursday night, when Binance halted withdrawals after a theft from its hot wallets.

Four readings, four sizes

Four counts of the same book circulated that week, all citing Deribit. A reading carried on 28 October put the notional at $10.92 billion across roughly 135,000 contracts, put/call ratio 0.53. CryptoTicker counted 135,545 contracts worth about $10.8 billion at a ratio of 0.55 on 27 October, then 135,159 contracts worth roughly $11 billion at 0.52 two days later. crypto.news called it almost $10.8 billion on Friday morning and gave no ratio. Part of that spread is the clock; open interest moves. The ratios do not have that excuse. The four do not reconcile. This desk sized the same expiry five ways on 27 October; the range has narrowed since without closing.

One aggregation of Friday's reporting puts the settlement print at $78,119, within $119 of max pain. No other account read here carries one, so it stands unverified.

The hedging started before the news did

The first large block trade crossed at 20:38 UTC on Thursday, about fifteen minutes after the first outflows from the Binance wallet and before any of it was public. It bought 250 bitcoin-equivalent lots of $78,000 puts expiring 31 October, about $20 million of notional. Three minutes later another 250 lots traded, and that buyer paid about 35% more. Over the eight hours after the theft, the block-trading venue Paradigm handled about $590 million of bitcoin options blocks, roughly half of Deribit's volume in that window, on figures it gave CoinDesk. The busiest hour came before Binance had said anything, and took in $155 million of mid-November $74,000 puts.

Nicolas Quatravaux, who runs Paradigm's EMEA desk, described the buying as conviction hedging against a near-term pullback, not deep-tail crash protection. Most of it sat near spot, between $74,000 and $78,000. Velo's one-week put skew, which measures how much more traders pay for downside than upside, touched about 18% during Asian hours on Friday.

The liquidation count kept moving

Four tallies of roughly the same day circulate, and none match. CoinGlass data carried by The Block at 10 p.m. in New York on Thursday gave $1.55 billion across 246,482 traders, longs $1.34 billion. The same source at 07:33 UTC on Friday gave $1.54 billion across about 239,000 traders, longs $1.30 billion. CoinDesk's headline a few hours later was $1.57 billion, and a second CoinDesk line said $1.5 billion. A rolling 24-hour count can rise without contradicting itself. No account says which window it used, and as published the figures do not reconcile. Longs absorbed the bulk of it either way, which has been the pattern through this drawdown.

"The Binance exploit has intensified market-wide selling, with BNB facing the greatest exposure," said Dominick John, an analyst at Zeus Research, in comments The Block published on Thursday night.

BNB was down 7.1% at $698.65 when The Block took its reading, against 4.5% for bitcoin. CoinDesk's CD20 index was off 5.72% by Friday afternoon.

November's book is a fraction of the size

The 6 November weekly carries about $1.29 billion with max pain at $80,000 and the 27 November monthly about $3.55 billion at the same level, on figures from a single aggregation no other account confirms. December's quarterly is the next heavy one, roughly $10.54 billion at $75,000. Not much weight is left for the price to lean on. Nothing on the macro calendar forces a repricing either, and the Fed held at 3.75% to 4% on Wednesday. Whether Friday's low holds is the open question, and the answer comes from spot, not from a book that has already settled.