63,100 bitcoins in option contracts expire on Friday

By | 25 February 2021
  • 63,100 bitcoins in options contracts will expire on Friday, February 26.
  • The Deribit platform dominates the BTC options market.
  • Exchanges had mixed results with bitcoin options.
  • According to data from Skew Analytics, about 63,100 Bitcoins (BTC) in option contracts are set to expire on Friday, February 26.

Skew shows in a tweet that there is $ 160 million in open bitcoin options with a strike price of $ 56,000. As shown in the graphs, options with a strike price of US $ 48,000 have the largest number of open contracts (4,400).

A response from skew shows that bitcoin open contracts had a notional total of $ 3 billion. In addition, it is also possible to see that the number of contracts doubled from December to January 2021.

A more detailed analysis shows that, despite a drop at the end of January this year, the total of open BTC contracts had risen back to $ 10 billion on February 11. As of February 21, the figure was about $ 13 billion.

Looking at more data on BTC options, the number of open interest has consistently exceeded $ 1.5 billion per day. The graphs show that Deribit is by far the market leader in BTC options, reaching US $ 1.7 billion on February 19 alone.

The value of BTC’s outstanding options exceeded $ 1 billion at Deribit for the first time in April 2020.

Bitcoin options

A similar event took place in June 2020, when a record 100,000 BTC options were about to expire. This was due to an explosion of open contracts.

Open interest is defined as the total number of open bitcoin option contracts, or positions that have not been closed by a buyer or seller. In this way, the number of open contracts is related to the number of contracts that will expire.

In this type of negotiation, investors with an open contract can choose to buy or sell the asset on the day the contract expires.

bitcoin options: Win or lose

Bitcoin options have had a mixed history on exchanges. Gaining popularity since the end of 2020, the Bakkt platform has launched options and futures
Futures contracts are literally agreements to buy or sell an asset at a future date and for a fixed price …. More
bitcoin in December 2019. The Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) did the same in January 2020, while Binance launched its own options and futures trading platform in April 2020.

However, CME has only a fraction of open interest compared to Deribit. Bakkt currently has zero, and Binance is no longer offering options on its platform.

For Binance, this may have something to do with the product’s supposed similarity to binary options. A more extreme variant, binary options investors receive a payment or lose all of their investment. For this reason, they are generally frowned upon in the market.