Bitcoin and Ethereum faced significant options expiries on Deribit on Friday, with Bitcoin’s $2.24 billion expiry briefly teasing a reversal before prices slid back toward the $76,000 area. According to a PerpFinder snapshot at 06:40 UTC, the expiring Bitcoin options comprised roughly $1.40 billion in calls and $844 million in puts. Deribit’s official delivery price settled at $77,234, calculated as a 30-minute time-weighted average of the exchange’s Bitcoin index from 07:30 to 08:00 UTC, sampled every four seconds.
Across Deribit’s BTC perpetual, Coinbase spot and Kraken spot, Bitcoin declined about 0.16% to 0.18% from 07:00 to 08:00 UTC, then gained roughly 0.19% to 0.21% by 09:00. However, the rebound did not hold. From 08:00 to 10:00 UTC, the Deribit perpetual slipped 0.014%, Coinbase fell 0.025% and Kraken lost 0.038%, leaving Bitcoin slightly below its expiry-time level on all three venues. The price later fell as low as $76,000 during Europe afternoon trading before recovering toward $77,500.
The expiry drew comparisons to a peer-reviewed study in Finance Research Letters that examined 1,059 Deribit expiry days from January 2021 to December 2023. The study found Bitcoin tended to fall in the hour before expiry and reverse during the following two hours when at-the-money open interest ranked in the top decile. Friday’s session showed only part of that pattern: the initial rebound occurred but the full reversal did not complete. Model-based dashboards including Optionly, CryptoGamma and ByKaranteli did not corroborate the negative cumulative gamma regime noted in the study.
At the same time, more than $400 million in ETH options expired, part of roughly $3 billion in crypto options settling on Deribit. Ethereum held between $2,440 and $2,535 after a strong upward move, trading at $2,466.60, down 0.55% over 24 hours, with trading volume near $17.6 billion. The put-to-call ratio for ETH options stood at 0.89, indicating cautious positioning. A sweep below $2,440 followed by a quick reclaim could open a path toward the weekly high near $2,535, according to the market setup.
