Overview
- Roughly $15.6–$16 billion of Bitcoin options on Deribit are set to expire at 08:00 UTC on Friday, Sept. 25, covering about 182,000 BTC and about 37% of Deribit’s BTC open interest.
- The expiring book is call-heavy with a put/call ratio near 0.69–0.71 and large call clusters at $85,000–$100,000 and put clusters at $60,000–$75,000 that concentrate hedging around specific strike levels.
- Dealers who sold calls hedge by buying spot or futures as price rises and selling as it falls, a process known as gamma hedging, and those flows likely helped drive Bitcoin’s rally into the mid-$80,000s.
- When the contracts settle on Friday those hedging flows will either roll into later expiries or disappear and this rollover or runoff, together with same-day U.S. durable goods and consumer-sentiment releases and the CME futures settlement, could amplify price swings.
- This expiry is seen as a follow-on to last week’s large ETF-linked expiries and strong ETF inflows, and traders will watch whether genuine buyer demand replaces the hedging that exits the market and thus whether the rally can hold.