Bitcoin Options Expire: Will Anyone Notice or Care?

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Friday, January 23rd-mark your calendars, if you still use paper ones-because a staggering 21,700 Bitcoin options contracts are expiring today. That’s $1.8 billion worth of digital promises, which sounds impressive until you realize it’s slightly less thrilling than last week’s expiration. Derivatives traders, apparently, are as sluggish as a sloth on Ambien.

Meanwhile, crypto markets have lost $200 billion this week, proving once again that money can disappear faster than my motivation to exercise. The usual suspects-trade wars, Japanese bond drama, and the U.S. government’s inability to pass crypto laws-are to blame. At this point, I’m convinced Congress thinks “blockchain” is a new brand of yoga pants.

The Great Bitcoin Gamble

This week’s Bitcoin options have a put/call ratio of 0.75, which means more people bet on prices going up than down. Max pain is set at $92,000-a number so optimistic it belongs in a self-help book. Spoiler alert: Bitcoin’s currently below that, so congratulations, gamblers, you’ve officially lost money.

The $100,000 strike price has $2 billion in open interest, because nothing says “rational investing” like betting on Bitcoin hitting six figures while the world burns. Bears, meanwhile, are lurking at $85,000 and $90,000, sharpening their claws like cartoon villains.

Total Bitcoin options open interest? A cool $36 billion. That’s enough money to buy every avocado toast in Brooklyn for a decade.

Deribit, ever the poet, stated:

“Expiry positioning is tightly clustered around key strikes, keeping spot sensitive into the cut.”

Translation: “We have no idea what’s going to happen, but here’s a fancy sentence to make it sound like we do.”

Ethereum’s Turn to Disappoint

Not to be outdone, Ethereum is serving up 118,000 expiring contracts worth $346 million. Max pain sits at $3,250-another number pulled straight from a fantasy novel-while the put/call ratio is 0.86. Total ETH options open interest? $8 billion. At least Ethereum holders are used to disappointment.

Combined, today’s crypto options expiries total $2.1 billion. That’s a lot of imaginary money evaporating into the ether. Literally.

The Market: Still Red, Still Sad

Crypto’s total market cap is down 1% today, wiping out all gains from this year. Bitcoin briefly flirted with $88,560 before weakly clawing back to $89,500-still shy of $90,000, because apparently, even digital gold has performance anxiety.

Ether, meanwhile, can’t even hold $3,000, currently sulking at $2,950 like a teenager who just got grounded. Altcoins? Down 2-3%, because when Bitcoin sneezes, altcoins catch pneumonia.

So, will markets react to today’s expiries? Probably. Will it matter? Probably not. But hey, at least we’ll always have memes.

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2026-01-23 10:49