$2.5 billion bet on Bitcoin to surge to $70k, with only 6 days left to cash out

Author: CryptoSlate

Compiled by: Deep Tide TechFlow

Deep Tide Reader: Throughout July, traders blamed the options wall for locking Bitcoin in place. But the wall has already been dismantled twice, and the price hasn’t budged. Now a $2.5 billion call options bet is set to expire, and Bitcoin is still 9% away from its $70k target — the real issue isn’t options suppression, it’s that nobody is buying.

Traders had a good reason all through July to explain why Bitcoin wouldn’t move: dense options contracts had boxed the price in. They believed the market makers selling these contracts, to balance their books, would buy on every dip and sell on every rise. Once the contracts were cleared, Bitcoin would finally be able to move freely.

Now that the contracts have cleared for two consecutive Fridays, Bitcoin is still sitting where it was. On Saturday, its trading price was just below $64,000, ending the week’s action — during the week it failed to hold $66,000, then slid back to the “protected” level in theory. That good reason has stopped working, leaving only boring facts: demand for Bitcoin is thin, and both buyers and sellers are thin.

The options numbers everyone is watching, and what they tell you

About 19,000 Bitcoin options expire on Friday at 08:00 UTC on Deribit, worth about $1.2 billion. Deribit handles most of the crypto options trading. The exchange pegged the biggest pain point for this expiry at $64,500. Bitcoin closed the day at $64,140, about $360 below the maximum pain point; it opened at $65,099 and traded as low as $63,740 intraday.

In the previous Friday, the maximum pain point for a similarly sized set of expiring contracts was $63,000, while Bitcoin rose over the following days toward $65,400. Two expiries, two opposite outcomes — in either case, the maximum pain point didn’t clearly pull anything.

Maximum pain is a number that’s quoted every week, as if it were a force of its own. Options are contracts that give someone the right to buy or sell Bitcoin at a set price on a set date, while maximum pain is simply a price — at which the sellers of these contracts have to pay the least when settling. It’s a snapshot of stacked positions, calculated from current open interest. It has no mechanism that pushes price toward it.

The $1.2 billion figure also needs to be handled the same way. That’s the notional value of the Bitcoin referenced by the contracts, and the money truly at risk is only a small fraction of it. We also can’t confidently say which direction market makers were forced to hedge into at settlement, because exchange data shows how many contracts exist at each strike price, not who holds which side.

Assertions about market maker positioning confidence are almost always built on assumptions, and the growth of the options market has made those assumptions expensive. Ethereum’s settlement contribution on Friday added another $234 million, with a maximum pain point of $1,875; the put/call ratio was 1.29, showing demand for downside protection for an entire month.

What really happened on Friday is easy to see in trading data. CryptoQuant’s across-the-exchange data tracking shows which side is crossing the spread — a decent indicator of who is in a hurry.

Traders holding leveraged long positions were forced to close $45.9 million worth of positions on Friday, while the short side was only $7.4 million — an imbalance of about six to one.

Leverage itself stayed sluggish. The funding rate — the fee longs pay shorts to keep positions open — averaged across exchanges at 0.0038% on Friday, down from 0.0064% five days earlier, nearly neutral. Open interest for futures and perpetuals closed at $22.35 billion, up from $21.26 billion at the prior expiry settlement, even as price fell 1.5%; open interest was still rising on Friday. New positions entered while the market was falling.

U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs saw outflows of $225.2 million on Thursday, ending a seven-day streak of inflows that had drawn nearly $1 billion; BlackRock’s IBIT accounted for $202.5 million of the reversal. Still, the week finished with net inflows of about $274 million.

Tensions between the U.S. and Iran resurfaced, pushing equities lower before the weekend and dragging crypto with them; the Crypto Fear and Greed Index fell three points to 28, and implied volatility slid toward 35%.

The bets still alive are 9% away from the target

Deribit’s order book around the July 31 monthly expiry at strike prices $70,000 and $72,000 held nearly $5 billion in open interest contracts, about 18% of the exchange’s entire $28 billion Bitcoin options book. Call options dominated at both strikes. As of July 20, about 27,000 contracts sat at $70,000, and about 21,000 were at $72,000.

A single structure made up a large share of it. Deribit Chief Business Officer Jean-David Péquignot described one big trade: buying 20,000 $70,000 call options and selling 20,000 $72,000 call options; the combined total notional value of this spread was about $2.5B.

If Bitcoin settles above $70,000, the trade is profitable; once it breaks above $72,000, profit stops increasing. And the upfront cost is lower than buying a lower strike alone, because selling the higher strike offsets part of the premium. Whoever built the position wanted a specific upside move within a specific time window, and paid for it.

That time window exists for a reason. Jimmy Yang of institutional liquidity provider Orbit Markets linked July 31 call demand to expectations that the CLARITY Act would pass, as traders had been trimming positions.

Polymarket currently prices the probability of passage in 2026 at about 35%, down from above 80% in February; earlier, a combined bank-agriculture draft removed the moral clauses requested by Democrats and drew formal objections from Senators Chris Murphy, Chris Van Hollen, and Jeff Merkley. The August recess leaves the Senate with a very narrow window for action.

The expiry also comes two days after the Fed decision. The FOMC meets on July 28 and 29, with the statement scheduled for Wednesday at 2:00 p.m. ET; Kevin Warsh’s press conference is set for half an hour later.

This meeting comes without economic forecasts, so the wording in the statement carries all the signals. Rates have been held at 3.50% to 3.75% for four consecutive meetings; the futures market assigns about a one-third probability to a 25 basis point hike, and the probability of a cut is effectively zero.

Vice Chair Philip Jefferson and Governor Christopher Waller both warned that if prices remain elevated, they may revisit policy, while Governor Lisa Cook pointed to an inflation rate of 3.7%.

Bitcoin would need to rise by about 9% within six days for the $70,000 strike to be in-the-money; Deribit’s own model assigns only a 14.5% chance that prices would merely touch that level during July, and 4.1% for $72,000.

Gamma exposure — a metric measuring how aggressively market makers must adjust hedges as prices move — concentrates at $65,000 and $72,000. The near-term cluster sits right at the top of the market, and it’s relatively small. The larger cluster is far enough away that it has little attraction until Bitcoin closes much of the distance on its own.

So the biggest conviction in the Bitcoin options market is concentrated at a price the market gives less than a sixth chance to reach for itself, and it expires 48 hours after a central bank meeting that nobody could confidently predict.

Those two weekly expiries that grabbed all the attention this month have already settled, and nothing has changed. Bitcoin’s range belongs to anyone who shows up in the spot market — and in the past week, very few people have.