Spooky Szn? Bitcoin Options Worth Record $31 Billion Set to Expire on Halloween

There’s roughly $31 billion worth of Bitcoin options set to expire on Halloween next week. That’s a record-high monthly expiry, beating last month’s $18 billion by a wide margin, despite the record-setting liquidation event that followed the Oct. 10 flash crash when $19 billion in leveraged positions were wiped out.

“That event erased roughly $7 billion in BTC options open interest, bringing total open interest down from about $38 billion to near $31 billion, the sharpest weekly contraction since June,” Bitfinex analysts told Decrypt.

There’s currently $14 billion worth of options contracts expiring next Friday on leading crypto derivatives exchange Deribit, which was acquired by Coinbase earlier this year. CME, the world’s largest derivatives exchange, has another $13.5 billion worth of Bitcoin options set to expire in a week’s time.

Even with the wipeout earlier this month, open interest on Deribit is at an all-time high, the exchange’s chief commercial officer told Decrypt.

“Bitcoin options open interest at Deribit has surged to a record $50.27 billion notional value across 453,820 active contracts this week, more than doubling year-to-date and reflecting heightened institutional hedging against downside risks,” he said.

He said there’s a notable concentration of put contracts with a $100,000 strike price that accounts for $2 billion worth of open interest, meaning that those traders are betting the BTC will fall to that level. And calls are clustering at the $120,000 level, he said, “suggesting bets on potential rebounds or volatility plays.” As of Friday morning, Bitcoin was changing hands for $109,866 after having gained 0.2% in the past day, according to crypto price aggregator CoinGecko.

Any time there’s a lot of open interest set to expire, analysts caution that it could set off a wave of volatility.

“Historical precedent suggests that large expiries often suppress volatility leading into the cut-off, then result in a clearer directional move in the 24-72 hours that follow,” Bitfinex analysts have told Decrypt previously. And even after the October flash crash, analysts cautioned that there’s still a lot of leverage in the market—which could set the scene for another cascade event.

Cascading liquidations, like the sort observed just two weeks ago, occur when the price of Bitcoin takes a sudden dip, causing leveraged long positions—that is, traders using borrowed capital to bet on the future price of Bitcoin—to be forcibly closed. Those leveraged long traders become forced sellers, adding further downward pressure to the price, which then in turn can cause other traders to be turned into forced sellers. And on and on it goes, until the leverage is flushed out.

“[These levels of leverage] create the potential for a cascade dynamic. People take significant leverage that might seem individually rational,” Carlos Guzman, researcher at GSR, previously told Decrypt following the Oct. 10 crash. “If one person got liquidated in isolation, that’s fine. There might be liquidity in the market to patch that, and it won’t be the worst. But if one liquidation leads to another liquidation, and another liquidation, then you’re absorbing all of the market’s liquidity.”

Bitcoin investors are still ingesting the latest Consumer Price Index report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The report was originally scheduled for October 17, but got delayed because of the ongoing government shutdown.

Now traders are looking ahead to next week’s Federal Open Markets Committee meeting. Traders believe there’s a 97% chance that the FOMC will approve another rate cut on Wednesday, according to the CME FedWatch Tool.

Meanwhile, Bitcoin ETF flows have softened since the start of the month. The first week saw $2.7 billion worth of net inflows. That reversed and turned into a $1.2 billion outflow the second week, after the $19 billion deleveraging event on October 10.

So far this week, Bitcoin funds have pulled in $356 million worth of net inflows, according to data from asset manager Farside Investors.

The Bitfinex analysts added that the slow rebuild of open interest isn’t a sign that traders have lost their conviction for BTC.

“In fact, large OI wipes to the tune of 20-40% of the total open interest across all strikes usually resolves in higher prices after the flush is over,” they said. “The time horizon for this is multiple months and a consolidation period is completely normal, even if we are nearing the end of our bull trend, we do not believe the top is in now.”

The notional value of expiring options could still change quite a bit before the expiry arrives next Friday

“Traders are slowly rolling their positions to the November contract while 1-week and 1-month Put-Call skews remain high at 5% and 4% respectively. But the market has repriced the skew lower after a rally in mid-month as two Fed rate cuts by year-end are now fully priced in after softer than expected U.S. inflation data.”