$15.9 Billion of Bitcoin Options Settle at 08:00 UTC…

About $15.9 billion of Bitcoin options are due to expire on Deribit at 08:00 UTC on Friday, removing roughly 37% of the venue's entire Bitcoin options open interest in a single quarterly settlement. The expiry arrives with Bitcoin trading near $83,500 after falling below $83,000 earlier Thursday. That puts spot well below several of the large bullish strikes accumulated when traders were positioning for higher prices, while the expiry's maximum-pain level remains much lower at $75,000. FinanceFeeds has already covered why Bitcoin fell below $84,000 on Thursday, with profit-taking after the recent rally, rising Treasury yields and leveraged liquidations all contributing to the reversal. Friday morning is the next part of that story: what actually disappears from the derivatives book when the September quarterly contracts settle. 37% of Deribit's Bitcoin Options Open Interest Expires at Once Deribit CEO Luuk Strijers told CoinDesk that approximately $15.9 billion of Bitcoin options expire at 08:00 UTC on September 25, against roughly $43.5 billion of total BTC options open interest on the venue when the data was sampled. That means around 37% of the outstanding Bitcoin options book reaches expiry at the same time. An earlier snapshot cited by Decrypt put the notional closer to $15.6 billion. The difference reflects when the options book was measured rather than two fundamentally different events. The $15.9 billion figure comes from the later CoinDesk report citing Deribit's Strijers. Ether adds another $2.1 billion of options expiring at the same 08:00 UTC settlement, taking the combined BTC and ETH expiry close to $18 billion. The notional figure does not mean $15.9 billion of cash will suddenly change hands Friday morning. It represents the face value of the contracts reaching expiry. Some finish with intrinsic value, others expire worthless, and traders can separately move exposure into later October or December contracts. The scale nevertheless matters because a large block of positions and the dealer hedges attached to them disappear at once. The Book Was Built for Higher Bitcoin Prices The September expiry remains tilted toward calls. Strijers described it as "one of the largest of the year on Deribit" and said the contract has a put/call open-interest ratio of 0.69, reflecting positioning that was built around higher Bitcoin prices. About $9.4 billion of the expiring notional is in calls. Deribit said 55% of that call notional was still in the money in its latest reported snapshot, while most of the put positions had little or no intrinsic value. Overall, roughly one-third of the $15.9 billion expiry was in the money at that point. But the distribution across strikes is more revealing than the headline total. The $70,000 strike contains more open contracts than any other single strike.