Today is June 14, 2024, and it's a remarkable day for the crypto market, as it is another day of the expiration of Bitcoin options. More than 2 billion in derivatives are due to mature, including about 20,000 Bitcoin options amounting to some 1.35 billion. The amount sounds big, but once again, comparatively speaking, today's event is relatively small in comparison to the previous weeks. So, this time, not much impact in the markets is expected. But there's a mammoth event scheduled on June 28 where a vast $6.7 billion in derivatives is expiring and may set things moving.
What caught my attention is the put/call ratio of these Bitcoin options, which is showing at 0.49. There are twice as many long positions expiring today as short ones.
The max pain point, which is the price at which most losses are going to be generated, is set at $68,500.
It's a tad higher than the current Bitcoin spot. Again, to sum up, bulls have not left BTC derivatives as the open interest is almost $1 billion at the $100,000 strike price. Significant open interests, showing bullish solid sentiment, are at $75,000 and $80,000 strike prices.
Despite that, the overall crypto market has generally been relatively quiet of late. The market's performance, according to Greeks Live—a crypto derivatives tooling provider—has been quite underperforming despite a big week of U.S. macroeconomic data releases. In general, mainstream coins have fallen, but altcoins have faced the music more. Short-term implied volatility for both Bitcoin and Ethereum has also dropped, which indicates that traders are not expecting big swings in prices shortly.
But this might change in the middle of the month if news related to an Ethereum ETF starts moving markets by increasing general sentiment and volatility.
Making today's BTC options expiry even more significant are the 200,000 Ethereum options going out, having a notional of $710 million. The puts/calls ratio reaches a record low for these options 0.36, and the options' max pain point is only $3,600, indicating a massively firm bullish conviction toward Ethereum. Unfortunately, Ethereum has been losing ground recently, dipping more briefly than we are used to,
by 7.7%, as it temporarily touched the four-week low of $3,434 before recovering to $3,515.
During the last 24 hours, the entire capitalization of the broader crypto market has stood at about $2.57 trillion, remaining relatively elevated. It had performed weakly at the end of last week and the beginning of this week, down around 7.5% for the past ten days. Notably, Bitcoin was trading around $67,000 early today and has recovered from a closer $68,000 fall from about $69,500 this week. Some analysts have said that Bitcoin miners have liquidated their profits, and this has placed selling pressure on the market.
But when standing in the middle of the market, one thing is relatively quiet in the world of crypto: there are not many hot spots or exciting developments that may turn things right up. Although there is much open interest in high strike prices for Bitcoin, the market is just waiting for something big to happen. This may come from the Ethereum ETF news or just some significant events within the crypto space.