Bitcoin (BTC) traded near $82,465 and Ethereum (ETH) near $2,495 on Deribit early on Friday, October 9, as Bitcoin and Ethereum options with a combined notional value of $2.16 billion moved toward their 08:00 UTC settlement. Both assets were trading below the max pain levels cited for the expiring contracts.
Bitcoin and Ethereum prices on Deribit before expiry
On Deribit’s Bitcoin options chain for the October 9 expiry, the Bitcoin index stood at $82,465 and the underlying futures price at $82,488.53 at about 05:28 UTC, with 2 hours 32 minutes left to expiry. Deribit is the largest listed venue for crypto options, and it settles its daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly options at 08:00 Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).
Implied volatility (IV), the market’s estimate of how much an asset’s price may move, was 32.0% on that chain. Deribit’s Bitcoin Volatility Index (DVOL), which tracks expected 30-day volatility from options prices, read 36.26. The eight-hour funding rate, the periodic payment between long and short perpetual futures traders, was slightly negative at minus 0.017%, meaning short positions were paying long positions a small amount.
On the Ethereum options chain for the same expiry, ETH was at $2,495.2 and the underlying futures price at $2,495.31, with 2 hours 31 minutes left. Ethereum IV was 33.7%, Ethereum DVOL was 49.50, and the eight-hour funding rate was flat at 0.000%. The $2,500 strike sat just above the market price.
These prices are a point-in-time reading from the Deribit order book and will change before settlement.
Where the $2.16 billion figure comes from
The combined expiry figure comes from an October 8 note by Adam, a researcher at options analytics firm Greeks.live, posted on X under @BTC__options. It was not published by Deribit.
According to the note, 22,000 Bitcoin options were set to expire on October 9 with a put/call ratio of 1.12, a max pain point of $84,000 and a notional value of $1.84 billion. For Ethereum, he counted 123,000 options with a put/call ratio of 0.71, a max pain point of $2,650 and a notional value of $320 million. Together, that is $2.16 billion. Adam added that the expiry covered about 6% of total Bitcoin options open interest and about 9% of Ethereum options open interest.
Notional value is the total market value of the assets the contracts represent, calculated as the number of contracts multiplied by the asset price. It is not the amount traders paid for the options, and it is not a count of 2.16 billion contracts. Because the figure was published before settlement, the final amount may differ as traders close or roll positions.
Deribit’s Bitcoin options statistics page does not show the October 9 expiry as a single dollar total. A separate check of that page on October 9 showed total Bitcoin options open interest (OI), the number of contracts still open, at 377,641 contracts across all expiries. That included 238,038 calls and 139,603 puts, worth about $31.17 billion, with Bitcoin near $82,526.
The put/call ratio on open interest across all expiries was 0.59, while 24-hour volume showed 20,077.40 puts against 18,496.40 calls, a volume put/call ratio of 1.09. Ethereum’s equivalent data is on Deribit’s Ethereum options statistics page.
What max pain and the put/call ratio show
Max pain is the strike price at which the largest number of options, by value, would expire worthless, leaving option buyers with the biggest combined loss. It is a positioning reference, not a price forecast.
Based on the Greeks.live figures, Bitcoin’s $84,000 max pain sat about $1,535 above the $82,465 Deribit index price. Ethereum’s $2,650 max pain sat about $155 above its $2,495.2 price.
The put/call ratio compares the number of put options, which profit if prices fall, with call options, which profit if prices rise. A reading above 1 means more puts than calls. Bitcoin’s 1.12 ratio points to a more defensive expiring book, while Ethereum’s 0.71 shows that calls outnumbered puts. Neither ratio predicts the direction of spot prices after settlement. Both show how traders were positioned when the note was written.
Adam also noted that implied volatility was low and that buyers were reluctant to pay for directional bets. He said gamma exposure, which measures how sharply option dealers may need to hedge as prices move, was concentrated at the $90,000, $95,000, and $100,000 Bitcoin strikes, with less open interest at $80,000 and $85,000. Those large call strikes sit well above Friday’s spot price.
Liquidations, ETF outflows, and the Fed set the backdrop
The expiry comes after a week of forced selling in leveraged crypto positions. As The Crypto Times reported, crypto liquidations reached about $1.12 billion in 24 hours as of 17:15 UTC on October 8, according to CoinGlass liquidation data. Ethereum accounted for the largest share at $318.30 million, followed by Bitcoin at $286.15 million. Long positions made up about $1.04 billion of the total.
Spot prices were already under pressure. On October 8, Bitcoin was testing support near $82,000 after U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs recorded about $487 million in net outflows on October 7, according to SoSoValue ETF flow data. On the same day, Ethereum held near $2,570 after U.S. spot Ethereum ETFs saw about $160.9 million in outflows on October 7, based on Farside Investors data.
The broader macro pressure came from the minutes of the U.S. Federal Reserve’s Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meeting held September 15 to 16, released on October 7. The minutes showed that most participants saw another rate increase as likely appropriate by the end of the year, after a unanimous decision to raise the federal funds target range to 3.75% to 4.00%. They did not commit to a move at the October 27 to 28 meeting. The Crypto Times covered how Bitcoin and Ethereum slid following the Fed minutes.
Key Bitcoin and Ethereum levels to watch after 08:00 UTC
Once the October 9 contracts settle at 08:00 UTC, open interest tied to that expiry will drop from the Deribit chain, and hedging linked to those contracts will unwind.
The levels that matter most are whether Bitcoin holds the low $82,000 range and whether Ethereum reclaims and holds $2,500. Max pain at $84,000 for Bitcoin and $2,650 for Ethereum does not by itself pull prices toward those strikes.
With funding rates near flat and implied volatility in the low 30% range on the expiring chains, the market was not pricing a sharp move into settlement, while the higher Ethereum DVOL reading of 49.50 shows traders expect more volatility in ETH than in BTC over the coming month.
Also Read: Lloyds Share Price Slips 1.66% to 100.60p: Why UK’s Most Tokenization-Forward Bank Matters to Crypto
