Two large Bitcoin options expiries cleared on consecutive Fridays, yet Bitcoin still trades near $64,000. With the positioning explanation gone, thin spot demand is what is left — and a $2.5 billion bet on $70,000 has six days to work.
Traders spent most of July explaining Bitcoin's flatline through a dense cluster of options contracts that had the price boxed in. Those contracts have now cleared on two consecutive Fridays, and Bitcoin is sitting roughly where it started, trading just under $64,000 on Saturday after failing to hold $66,000 during the week. What is left is thin demand on both sides of the market.
Two expiries, two opposite outcomes
About 19,000 Bitcoin options worth roughly $1.2 billion expired at 08:00 UTC on Friday on Deribit, which handles the bulk of crypto options trading. The exchange put max pain for that expiry at $64,500, and Bitcoin closed the day at $64,140, about $360 underneath it, having opened at $65,099 and touched $63,740 along the way.
The Friday before, an expiry of identical size carried a max-pain level of $63,000, and Bitcoin drifted up toward $65,400 in the days afterward. In neither case did max pain visibly pull anything, because it is a snapshot of where bets have piled up rather than a force acting on price.
Sellers were the ones in a hurry
Sellers crossed the spread on both Thursday and Friday, according to CryptoQuant's exchange-wide figures. The Coinbase premium index sank to a 0.088% discount on Friday, its widest since July 16, indicating that American buyers had stepped back.
Leveraged longs were forced out of $45.9 million on Friday against $7.4 million on the short side. Leverage itself stayed subdued, and funding rates are the payment leveraged longs make to shorts to hold their positions open. They averaged 0.0038% across exchanges on Friday, down from 0.0064% five days earlier.
Meanwhile, US spot Bitcoin ETFs shed $225.2 million on Thursday, ending a seven-session run that had drawn in close to $1 billion. The week still finished positive at around $274 million. Bitcoin.com News reports that bitcoin has lost 26% since Jan. 1, a decline it says has weighed heavily on miner economics.
The $2.5 billion bet is 9% away
Deribit's board carries nearly $5 billion of open interest at the $70,000 and $72,000 strikes for the July 31 monthly expiry, roughly 18% of the exchange's entire $28 billion Bitcoin options book. Call options dominate both strikes. Deribit chief commercial officer Jean-David Péquignot described a single block that bought 20,000 of the $70,000 calls and sold 20,000 of the $72,000 calls, a combination worth about $2.5 billion in gross notional across the two legs.
Yet Bitcoin has to climb about 9% in six days for the $70,000 strike to finish in the money, and Deribit's own probabilities put the odds of the price merely touching that level during July at 14.5%, with $72,000 at 4.1%.
The Fed decision lands two days first
The FOMC meets July 28 and 29, with the statement due at 2:00 p.m. ET on Wednesday and Kevin Warsh's press conference half an hour later. Rates have held at 3.50% to 3.75% across four consecutive meetings, and futures markets assign roughly a one-in-three chance to a quarter-point increase, with a cut priced at effectively zero.
Jimmy Yang of Orbit Markets tied the July 31 call demand to expectations that the CLARITY Act would pass, and traders have been trimming since. Polymarket now prices 2026 passage at roughly 35%, down from above 80% in February. Bitcoin's range belongs to whoever shows up in the spot market, and over the past week very few did.
Sources: CryptoSlate, Bitcoin News
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