Bitcoin’s $11 billion options expiry settled almost exactly at its $78,000 max pain point on Friday, with about 86% of contracts expiring worthless — but the session’s real damage came from the Binance hack selloff, which drove bitcoin to $76,400 and pushed 24-hour liquidations to $1.57 billion, according to CoinDesk.
Summary
- About 135,000 BTC options expired Friday at 08:00 UTC — roughly $11 billion of notional, a third of Deribit’s bitcoin options open interest.
- With 86% of contracts out of the money, only about $130 million changed hands at settlement.
- Bitcoin hit $76,400 overnight, its lowest since September 18; liquidations jumped fourfold to $1.57 billion.
- The Fear & Greed Index crashed from 51 to 29, and post-expiry positioning turned defensive, led by the $74,000 put for November 13.
The expiry itself landed quietly. With a put/call ratio near 0.52 and max pain at $78,000, prices settled close enough to the pain point that the feared volatility never arrived from the options book: roughly $130 million — about 1% of notional — moved at settlement.
The hack did what the expiry could not
The selling came from elsewhere. Bitcoin had closed Thursday at $77,839, its lowest daily close since September 17, and slid to $76,400 overnight as news of the $6.3 billion Binance theft spread. Ether touched $2,170 before rebounding toward $2,220, and BNB fell 6.2%, the largest drop among major coins.
Futures liquidations jumped fourfold to $1.57 billion in 24 hours — $522 million in bitcoin and $361 million in ether — as volume rose 74% to $346.1 billion. News service Watcher.Guru reported on X that more than $1.3 billion of leveraged long positions were liquidated within five hours of the hack, a figure also cited by CoinCentral.
Defensive into November
Sentiment flipped with the price: the Crypto Fear & Greed Index fell 21 points to 29, putting “Uptober” on track to end in fear, with bitcoin dominance near 59% and total market value around $2.6 trillion. Analyst Benjamin Cowen pointed to the 200-day moving average near $73,000 as potential support.
Traders are hedging for more downside. Five of the six highest-volume bitcoin options after the expiry were puts, led by the $74,000 put expiring November 13, and the 25-delta skew rose across all tenors in both bitcoin and ether. The next major Deribit expiry lands on December 25, about two weeks after the December 8–9 Federal Reserve meeting.
