Bitcoin Options Expiry Calendar: Max Pain, Put/Call Ratio and Key Strikes

 

At 08:00 UTC on September 25, roughly $16 billion of Bitcoin options settled on Deribit, clearing out more than a third of the venue's outstanding Bitcoin options exposure in a single half-hour window. Positioning did not reset into calm afterwards. It rolled forward, and the market immediately began pricing the next set of dates. Expiries matter not because of what happens on the day itself but because they are among the few liquidity events that can be known in advance: the contract counts, the strike distribution and the settlement time are all public before the fact.

 

Bitcoin is trading near $83,500. The max pain level for the October 30 monthly contracts sits around $76,000, roughly $8,000 below spot, and the October and December expiries each carry about $10 billion of notional. The single largest contract on the board is the October 30 $95,000 call, with more than 23,000 BTC of open interest. Putting those dates, figures and strikes into one calendar that can be refreshed each month is considerably more useful than looking them up in a rush before every settlement.

 

 

 

Expiry timing is a published rule, not an ad hoc schedule. Deribit's Bitcoin options settle at 08:00 UTC, with weeklies on each Friday, monthlies on the last Friday of each calendar month and quarterlies on the last Friday of each calendar quarter. CME Bitcoin options terminate at 4:00 p.m. London time on the last Friday of the contract month.

 

Max pain is a positioning map, not a price target. The October 30 contracts show max pain near $76,000 on Deribit, around $79,000 on Binance and about $80,000 on OKX. The fact that one event produces three different numbers is itself the warning label.

 

The put/call ratio describes positioning, and the basis matters. The September 25 contracts carried an open-interest put/call ratio between 0.69 and 0.71, with calls in the majority. Volume-based and open-interest-based readings can diverge sharply.

 

Key strikes explain where price tends to stick. The October 30 $95,000 call holds 23,350.8 BTC of open interest, the clearest upside concentration on the board.

 

December 25 is the next genuinely large date. It is simultaneously a monthly, quarterly and annual expiry, and year-end settlements have historically been the largest of the year.

 

 

 

Most Bitcoin options trade on Deribit, so its schedule effectively defines the market's rhythm. According to Deribit's contract introduction policy, Bitcoin options are listed as daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly series. Dailies expire every day at 08:00 UTC, weeklies on each Friday at 08:00 UTC, monthlies on the last Friday of each calendar month and quarterlies on the last Friday of each calendar quarter. New weekly, monthly and quarterly series are often introduced on Thursdays, and a new monthly is typically listed 22 days before the existing one expires, which is why two monthly expiries are usually visible at once.

 

The settlement mechanics are equally explicit. Deribit's settlement documentation states that options are European-style and cash-settled, with the delivery price for an expiring instrument calculated as the 30-minute time-weighted average of the relevant index from 07:30 to 08:00 UTC. Exercise therefore depends on a half-hour average rather than a single print, which limits the scope for a large order at the settlement second to distort the outcome. In-the-money options are exercised automatically, out-of-the-money options are abandoned, and expired positions drop out of the account after 08:00.

 

 

The CME Group calendar does not line up with Deribit's, a detail that is often overlooked. Per the CME options on Bitcoin futures FAQ, the last day of trading for monthly options is the last Friday of the contract month, trading terminates at 4:00 p.m. London time, and in-the-money options exercise automatically into expiring cash-settled futures that settle to the CME CF Bitcoin Reference Rate. One rule deserves a flag: Chapter 350 of the CME rulebook provides for the last trading day to move earlier when the last Friday is not a business day in both the UK and the US. The last Friday of December 2026 falls on December 25, so the CME date should be confirmed against the contract specs and exchange notices rather than assumed to match Deribit's.

 

Separately, Bitcoin Friday futures and their options expire to the CME CF Bitcoin Reference Rate New York Variant every Friday at 4:00 p.m. ET, with each contract sized at 1/50 of a bitcoin. For anyone watching across venues, that means a single Friday can contain two settlement windows in two time zones: Deribit at 08:00 UTC, then CME at 4:00 p.m. London time.

 

 

The table below sets out the main Deribit Bitcoin options expiries from late 2026 through the first quarter of 2027. All settle at 08:00 UTC. Weeklies fall on every Friday, and only the dates carrying monthly or quarterly status are called out alongside the weekly cadence.

 

 

 

September 25 was among the largest expiries of the year. CoinDesk reported, citing Deribit chief executive Luuk Strijers, that roughly $15.9 billion of Bitcoin options and about $2.1 billion of Ether options were due at 08:00 UTC, with the Bitcoin leg alone accounting for 37% of the venue's roughly $43.5 billion in Bitcoin open interest. Strijers described the September series as call-heavy, with an open-interest put/call ratio of 0.69. Bitcoin was trading near $85,500 while max pain sat at $75,000. Deribit's chief commercial officer, Jean-David Péquignot, said the distribution of open interest across strikes pointed to a floor around $75,000.

 

Settlement did not drag price toward max pain. A post-expiry review by crypto.news noted that roughly 167,000 to 184,000 BTC of contracts settled at 08:00 UTC with a put/call ratio of 0.69 to 0.71 and max pain near $75,000 to $76,000, while stressing that the widely quoted notional open interest is a snapshot of exposure rather than a bill that comes due. That is the single most common misreading of expiry coverage: notional measures exposure, not the cash that changes hands on the day.

 

 

What settlement really alters is the structure of positioning. Derivatives tracking from news.bitcoin.com put Bitcoin options open interest around $36 billion on the afternoon of September 30, after a spike above $50 billion before the last large expiry. Calls still accounted for 60.88% of open interest, and the October and December expiries each carried roughly $10 billion of notional. The October 30 $95,000 call topped the displayed contract rankings with 23,350.8 BTC of open interest.

 

Read together, those figures say that the quarterly cleared out about a third of the exposure and that what remained has re-concentrated into two nodes, late October and year-end. For spot traders, that means price will meet a visible strike cluster as it approaches $95,000 over the next two months, with another structural reference point defined by positioning around $75,000 to $76,000. Checking live quotes against those strikes is straightforward on the BTC price page.

 

 

 

Max pain is the strike at which the aggregate intrinsic value of all outstanding options would be lowest under a given positioning snapshot. If settlement landed exactly there, option buyers as a group would collect the least. Deribit itself frames the level as a soft magnet for price into expiry rather than a forecast.

 

Its limits are visible in the data. As of September 30, the October 30 contracts showed max pain near $76,000 on Deribit, around $79,000 on Binance and about $80,000 on OKX, while December reference levels sat near $75,000 on Deribit and OKX and around $80,000 on Binance. One expiry, four or five thousand dollars of disagreement, for the simple reason that each venue can only compute from its own book. The number also moves daily because positioning moves daily. Treating a single day's reading as a target price mistakes a drifting statistic for a fixed anchor.

 

The August 28 expiry is a useful control case. Decrypt reported that about 81,700 Bitcoin options worth $6.44 billion expired on Deribit that day, split between 44,639 calls and 37,061 puts for a put/call ratio of 0.83, with max pain between $68,000 and $70,000 while Bitcoin traded near $79,000. Both that settlement and September's shared the same shape: price well above max pain, and no meaningful pull back toward it.

 

 

The put/call ratio confuses people because it has at least two definitions. The open-interest version divides outstanding put contracts by outstanding calls and describes the standing book's directional tilt. The volume version uses the day's trading and describes where activity is currently flowing. The 0.69 to 0.71 figure attached to the September 25 contracts was the open-interest basis, meaning roughly 70 puts for every 100 calls.

 

There is no absolute bullish or bearish threshold. Bitcoin options have carried more call than put open interest for years, so a reading near 0.7 is closer to baseline than to euphoria. The informative part is the direction of travel: a ratio rising while price rises often means upside exposure is being hedged rather than faded. The CoinGlass Deribit options dashboard provides live volume, open interest, implied volatility, max pain and expiry distribution, which makes the slope easy to track.

 

 

Strike concentrations are often more intuitive than max pain. Analysis published by CryptoSlate cited an open-source gamma model placing the largest call wall at $95,000, the largest put wall at $60,000 and the zero-gamma level near $71,000. Worth stating plainly: models of this kind rest on assumptions about which side of the book dealers sit on, so their output is inference rather than exchange-disclosed data.

 

The same analysis recorded the volatility backdrop into settlement. Deribit's DVOL index stood at 38.1, at-the-money implied volatility for the Friday contracts was also 38.1%, and 25-delta puts and calls were both priced near 39.2%, leaving skew close to neutral. DVOL measures 30-day forward-looking annualized volatility, and dividing the reading by the square root of 365 gives a rough estimate of the expected daily move. Near-neutral skew meant the market was neither paying up for downside protection nor chasing upside convexity, which is consistent with a price sitting between strike clusters.

 

 

 

Expiries matter to spot and futures traders because the hedging flow that dealers run against options exposure changes intensity as settlement approaches. When a large block of contracts sits near a particular strike close to expiry, that hedging tends to resist moves away from it. Once settlement clears, the constraint disappears and price regains freedom of movement. That is the basis for the observation that the days after an expiry are often more revealing than the day itself.

 

In practice the checklist is short: before an expiry, review margin and liquidation levels on leveraged positions so a thin-liquidity window does not force an exit; for anyone accumulating or holding over longer horizons, the date itself is rarely a reason to act. Readers newer to the market can work through the complete guide to buying Bitcoin and the BTC purchase page before layering a derivatives calendar on top.

 

 

October contains a notable overlap. The FOMC meeting calendar places the next policy meeting on October 27 to 28, two days before the monthly options settle on October 30. Given that the Fed raised the federal funds target range to 3.75% to 4% on September 16, and that CNBC reported 16 of 18 participants in the updated dot plot expect at least one further hike this year, the October contracts will settle into a market that has just digested a policy signal. Event risk and settlement risk landing in the same week typically lifts short-dated implied volatility into the meeting and compresses it afterwards.

 

Flows belong in the same frame. Farside Investors' spot Bitcoin ETF data shows a single-day net inflow of $999 million on September 21, decelerating to $134.5 million by September 25 and turning to a $148.7 million net outflow on September 30. CoinMarketCap's summary notes that 2026 year-to-date flows turned positive on September 22, after bottoming at minus $5.69 billion on July 13. ETF creations and redemptions are real spot buying and selling; options open interest is derivative exposure. When the two point the same way, trends tend to extend. When they diverge, ranges tend to persist.

 

Order book depth shifts more than usual around settlement, so setting up the strikes and triggers you care about ahead of time beats reacting on the day. Track the key strikes live on the MEXC BTC/USDT spot market, and keep an eye on the scheduled activity on the BTC Carnival event page.

 

 

 

The first is treating notional open interest as money leaving the market. The $16 billion figure measures exposure at a point in time; what actually settles is the net difference on in-the-money contracts, a far smaller sum. The second is treating max pain as a target. In each of the last two settlements Bitcoin cleared well above it, which suggests the magnet effect is weak when positioning is dispersed and spot volume is adequate. The third is treating gamma-model output as disclosed fact. These models require an assumption about dealer positioning, and different assumptions produce different walls.

 

 

Options data decays quickly. Max pain, put/call ratios and strike distributions change daily, and acting on a week-old snapshot is a common error. Venue differences compound the problem, since Deribit, CME, Binance and OKX differ in book composition, contract specifications and settlement times, making cross-venue comparison of raw numbers unreliable. Liquidity can also thin around expiries, particularly over the year-end holiday window, widening spreads and increasing slippage. Leveraged positions face elevated liquidation risk in exactly those conditions.

 

 

After the October 30 settlement, total Bitcoin options open interest will drop again, and both the size of the drop and the speed of the rebuild will indicate whether the market is reducing risk or simply rolling forward. Into December 25, watch whether positioning concentrates in the year-end contracts or migrates early into the first quarter of 2027, which tends to reveal institutional appetite for carrying risk across the turn. On volatility, the rise in DVOL into the October meeting and the pace of its decline afterwards is a direct read on whether event premium was adequately priced. On strikes, continued growth in open interest at the $95,000 call during a rally would signal upside positioning being added rather than harvested.

 

 

James Mitchell's view is that most expiry commentary runs the causation backwards. The market keeps asking where settlement will push price, when the better question is which constraints disappear once settlement clears. Two recent data points tell a consistent story. The August 28 contracts carried max pain between $68,000 and $70,000 and Bitcoin settled near $79,000. The September 25 contracts carried max pain between $75,000 and $76,000 and Bitcoin settled above $85,000. Neither produced a gravitational pull. With adequate spot volume and reasonably dispersed positioning, treating max pain as a center of gravity does not hold up.

 

The likely misreading sits in the sense of scale. Sixteen billion dollars is a striking headline, but it measures notional exposure outstanding, not cash settled on the day. What genuinely changed the board is that the settlement removed roughly a third of Deribit's Bitcoin options exposure in one window, pulling open interest from above $50 billion to around $36 billion. With less of the book hedged, the same quantity of spot buying or selling moves price further. That is why the sessions after a large expiry often carry more directional information than the expiry itself.

 

Three measurable things deserve attention next. The first is the speed at which open interest rebuilds. If exposure returns to pre-settlement levels within two weeks of the October expiry, the market is rolling rather than retreating. The second is the gap between DVOL and realized volatility. DVOL read 38.1 into the last settlement, with implied and realized near parity, a state in which options are neither rich nor cheap and the edge in a directional view comes from the underlying rather than from a volatility mispricing. The third is open interest at the $95,000 call, currently the largest single contract at 23,350.8 BTC, which doubles as a positioning-defined resistance and a potential gamma inflection zone. Alongside that, the October 27 to 28 FOMC meeting sits two days ahead of the October 30 settlement, a stack that historically corresponds to volatility bid into the meeting and compressed afterwards. Position sizing should be set accordingly rather than absorbed passively during the event week.

 

Across assets, the crypto options market is reproducing a rhythm traditional markets have run for decades. Quarterly index option settlements and the so-called quadruple witching dates have been studied at length in equities, and the conclusion is broadly stable: the dates are highly predictable, the price effects are not. Bitcoin options behave the same way, with two differences. Positioning is more concentrated, since one venue carries the overwhelming majority of flow, which makes the distribution data unusually informative. And the sample of large settlements remains small, which argues for humility about statistical claims. The practical use of an expiry calendar is as a risk management timetable for sizing and margin, not as a timing signal.

 

 

 

Deribit's Bitcoin options settle at 08:00 UTC across four series. Dailies expire every day, weeklies on each Friday, monthlies on the last Friday of each calendar month and quarterlies on the last Friday of each calendar quarter. CME monthly Bitcoin options terminate at 4:00 p.m. London time on the last Friday of the contract month, with the last trading day moving earlier if that Friday is not a business day in both the UK and the US.

 

 

Max pain is the strike at which the total intrinsic value of all outstanding options would be smallest under current positioning. Deribit describes it as a soft magnet into expiry rather than a forecast. It moves daily and differs by venue: the October 30 contracts show roughly $76,000 on Deribit, $79,000 on Binance and $80,000 on OKX. In each of the last two large settlements, Bitcoin cleared well above the level.

 

 

October 30 is a monthly expiry carrying about $10 billion of notional. November 27 is the next monthly. December 25 is simultaneously a monthly, quarterly and annual expiry with roughly $10 billion of notional, making it the most closely watched date of the year. Weeklies settle every Friday. In 2027, January 29 and February 26 are monthlies and March 26 is the first quarterly.

 

 

There is no fixed threshold, and at least two bases exist. The open-interest version describes the standing book, while the volume version describes current activity. The September 25 contracts carried an open-interest ratio of 0.69 to 0.71, with calls in the majority. Because Bitcoin options have long skewed toward call open interest, a reading near 0.7 is close to baseline. The direction of change carries more information than any single print.

 

 

No reliable pattern supports that. Dealer hedging against options exposure can resist moves away from heavily populated strikes as settlement nears, but the constraint lifts once contracts clear, which increases rather than reduces freedom of movement. After roughly $16 billion settled on September 25, Bitcoin continued to trade between $83,000 and $85,000 rather than gravitating toward the $75,000 max pain level.

 

 

Strike clusters show where positioning is densest. The October 30 $95,000 call currently leads with 23,350.8 BTC of open interest, forming the clearest upside concentration. Some analysts infer call walls and put walls from gamma models, but those depend on assumptions about dealer positioning and are inference rather than exchange-disclosed data, so the underlying assumptions should be checked before relying on the output.

 

 

Yes, but for a different purpose. Traders using leverage benefit from reviewing margin and liquidation levels before an expiry so a thin-liquidity window does not force an exit. For long-term holders or anyone buying on a schedule, the date itself is rarely a reason to transact. Its practical value is as a timetable flagging when volatility may widen, not as a timing signal.

 

 

The information above is provided for general market information and analysis only and does not constitute investment advice, financial advice, legal advice, tax advice or a recommendation to trade. Crypto assets and their derivatives can move sharply, derivatives involve leverage, and potential losses may exceed the initial outlay. Past performance, technical indicators, options positioning data and on-chain metrics do not guarantee future results. Open interest, max pain levels, put/call ratios, implied volatility and strike distributions cited here are snapshots taken at specific moments and will change, so the latest figures published by the relevant exchanges and data providers should be treated as authoritative. Readers should conduct their own research and make decisions based on their own financial circumstances, investment objectives and risk tolerance, consulting a qualified professional where appropriate. The MEXC Crypto Pulse team accepts no liability for any direct or indirect loss arising from the use of this information.

 

 

James Mitchell specializes in technical analysis, market trends, and trading strategies for both Bitcoin and altcoins. Based in London, he has over 10 years of experience in financial markets. Before joining MEXC Learn, James worked as a senior analyst at a leading European investment firm, where he developed expertise in risk management and quantitative trading. His transition to cryptocurrency markets began in 2017, and he has since become recognized for his data-driven approach. He holds a Master's degree in Financial Economics from the London School of Economics. His analytical approach combines traditional technical analysis with on-chain metrics to provide readers with actionable insights.

 

Areas of Expertise: Technical Analysis, Market Trends & Cycles, Trading Strategies, Bitcoin & Altcoin Analysis, Risk Management.

 

 

 

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