“$11 billion in bitcoin options expire Friday.” The sentence is easy to write, easy to share and almost impossible to act on unless you know what is inside it. This week the same expiry, Friday 30 October, has been reported as $11.1 billion on Deribit (CryptoTicker, 24 October), $11.69 billion without a named venue (Decrypt, as cited by PrimeXBT, 23 October), and with a different figure again in CryptoTicker’s own related headlines. Which number is right, and does any of them tell you where the price is going? This field guide gives five checks you can run on any expiry headline in a couple of minutes, and scores them on this week’s coverage.
Informational only. This is an explanation of how to read published data, not a forecast and not investment advice.
Why headlines about expiries mislead
A bitcoin option is a contract that gives the holder the right, not the obligation, to buy (a call) or sell (a put) at a set price, the strike, by a set date. On the expiry date every contract that is still open either settles or lapses. Large expiries get attention because a big number looks like a big event. But the number in a headline is normally notional value: the number of bitcoin the contracts refer to, multiplied by the current price. It is not the amount of money that changes hands, and it is not the amount that can be lost. The five checks below separate those ideas.
Check 1: Which venue, and which contracts?
Start with the venue. Deribit is generally regarded as the largest crypto-options exchange, but CME, Binance, OKX, Bybit and others list bitcoin options too, and a figure for “all bitcoin options” is not a figure for Deribit. Then ask which expiry: monthly contracts settle on the last Friday of the month at 08:00 UTC on Deribit, while weekly and daily contracts expire on other dates. A headline that says “$11 billion expires Friday” should say where and which series.
Scoring this week: CryptoTicker names Deribit, gives the date (Friday 30 October, around 09:00 German time) and says the $11.1 billion is 34.6% of open Deribit bitcoin options, citing an analysis dated 22 October. The Decrypt figure, as relayed by PrimeXBT, says “options expiry on October 30 covering $11.69 billion of Bitcoin” without naming a venue. Verdict: partly answerable.
Check 2: Notional in dollars, or the number of coins?
A dollar notional moves with the price even if no one trades. If 137,400 bitcoin of options are open and the price is $80,783, the notional is about $11.1 billion (our arithmetic). Each $1,000 the price rises adds roughly $137 million to the headline without a single new contract being written. The same $11.1 billion, quoted a week earlier at a lower price or later at a higher one, would correspond to a different number of coins. Always ask for the coin count and the date of the price used.
| Headline notional | Equivalent coins at $80,783 (our arithmetic) | Note |
|---|---|---|
| $11.1 billion (CryptoTicker, Deribit) | About 137,400 BTC | Dated analysis of 22 October |
| $11.69 billion (Decrypt via PrimeXBT) | About 144,700 BTC | Venue not named |
| $12.2 billion (a CryptoTicker related headline) | About 151,000 BTC | Not reconciled by CryptoTicker |
Scoring this week: the coverage gives dollar figures that differ by up to about 10%, and CryptoTicker notes that its related headlines carry other coin counts (140,844 and 135,545 BTC) that it does not reconcile. The price date behind each figure is not always stated. Verdict: fails; the numbers are not directly comparable.
Video: a March 2026 example from the Crypto World Daily channel of the same kind of expiry headline, for comparison. Dated background, not our analysis.
Check 3: Calls or puts, and how far from the current price?
The put/call ratio compares open put contracts with open call contracts. CryptoTicker reports 0.56 for this expiry, meaning calls outnumber puts. That sounds bullish but is not a forecast: calls can be bought as speculation, sold to earn income, or hedged elsewhere. The more useful question is where the strikes are. CryptoTicker says the largest single position in early October was at the $95,000 strike, about 25,031 BTC or roughly $2.07 billion at the time, and that such calls expire worthless unless bitcoin rises about 17% (95,000 is 17.6% above $80,783 by our arithmetic). Contracts that are far out of the money inflate the headline notional while carrying very little value and exerting very little pull on the price.
The right way to think about it: notional is the size of the bet, not the money at stake. The most a buyer of an option can lose is the premium paid, which for a deep out-of-the-money call can be a tiny fraction of its notional. Scoring this week: the put/call ratio and the biggest strike are given, with a date; the share of notional that is near the money is not. Verdict: partly answerable.
Check 4: Is “max pain” a level, a magnet or a story?
“Max pain” is the strike at which the total payout to option holders would be smallest at expiry. The theory says the price tends to be pulled there. The evidence for that pull is weak, and the figure depends on whose data you use. For this expiry CryptoTicker cites $78,000 from Deribit-based analyses, and also notes that other venues such as Binance and OKX show $81,000–82,000 (CryptoTicker, 24 October). That is a spread of $3,000–4,000, or about 4–5%, for the same asset in the same week. CryptoTicker itself says max pain describes positioning, not direction, and is not evidence of a buyer floor at $78,000.
We cannot test the magnet claim directly because we do not hold a historical series of max-pain levels, and we do not endorse it. Scoring this week: the level is given, the venue spread is disclosed, but nothing in the coverage shows that the level has predicted past outcomes. Verdict: fails as a forecast; passes as a description.
Check 5: Does the headline give a base rate?
The last check is the one that most headlines skip: how much does bitcoin usually move on expiry day? From 105 last-Friday-of-the-month expiries since 2018 the average absolute move was 2.26% against 2.20% on all days; from 2022 it was 1.44% against 1.80% (full tables and caveats). A move of 3% or more happened on 25.7% of expiry days since 2018 versus 24.1% of all days. If a headline does not tell you that normal moves on these days are about as large as on any day, it is selling the size of the number rather than the size of the effect.
Chart: bitcoin over one month, TradingView widget (live data).
The scorecard
| Check | Question to ask | What this week’s coverage gives | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Venue and series | Which exchange, which expiry date? | Deribit and 30 October (CryptoTicker); venue missing in the Decrypt figure | Partly answerable |
| 2. Notional vs coins | What price, how many BTC? | Dollar figures from $11.1B to $12.2B; price dates unclear | Fails |
| 3. Calls, puts, strikes | Ratio, and how far out of the money? | Put/call 0.56; $95,000 strike about 17% above spot; near-the-money share not given | Partly answerable |
| 4. Max pain | Whose number, and is it a forecast? | $78,000 (Deribit-based) vs $81,000–82,000 (Binance, OKX); not a floor | Fails as a forecast |
| 5. Base rate | How much does it move on a normal expiry? | Not given in the headlines; we compute 1.4–2.3% average move | Missing; we supply it |
Of five checks, none is fully satisfied by the public coverage alone. That does not mean the expiry is unimportant. It means the headline number is the least informative thing about it.
A 60-second checklist you can reuse
- Write down the venue, the date and the series before you read the number.
- Convert the dollar notional into coins at today’s price, then compare with other articles.
- Find the put/call ratio and the largest strikes; note how far they are from the current price.
- Treat max pain as a description of positioning on one venue, not a target.
- Compare any claimed “volatility event” with the historical average move on expiry days.
Video: a 2021 CoinDesk discussion of expiry positioning, included as dated background to show that the same framing has been used for years. Not our analysis.
Where this fits with the week’s other guides
Expiries are one kind of scheduled number. Our guide to reading rate-hike probabilities applies the same discipline to Fed futures, and our guide to reading prediction-market prices does so for event contracts. In all three cases the safest habit is to ask who is quoting the number, what it measures, and what the ordinary range looks like when nothing special is happening.
Method: bitcoin prices are Coinbase Exchange data pulled by Bitcoin Mastery at about 07:05 UTC on Wednesday 28 October 2026. Third-party figures are attributed to their source and date. Expiry totals, put/call ratio, strike data and max-pain levels are as reported by CryptoTicker (24 October) and Decrypt via PrimeXBT (23 October); we did not independently pull Deribit data. Coin-count conversions and percentage distances are our arithmetic at a spot price of $80,783 (Coinbase, 07:04 UTC on 28 October).
Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are volatile and you can lose some or all of the money you put in. Nothing here is a recommendation to buy, sell or hold bitcoin, any exchange-traded fund, any listed security or any other asset, and the technical levels, probabilities and scenarios discussed are descriptions of published data, not forecasts. Do your own research and consult a licensed financial advisor before making investment decisions.