The end of the week, month, and first quarter of the year has arrived, and with it, a massive batch of Bitcoin and Ether options contracts will be expiring.
Around 195,400 Bitcoin options contracts will expire on Friday, Mar. 27, with a notional value of roughly $13.4 billion. This event is much larger than usual, being an end-of-month and end-of-quarter expiry, so there may be some volatility in spot markets.
Crypto prices have been flat over the past week, with total capitalization returning to Monday’s levels.
Bitcoin Options Expiry
This week’s big batch of Bitcoin options contracts has a put/call ratio of 0.61, meaning that there are many more longs than shorts expiring. Max pain is around $75,000, according to Coinglass, which is much higher than current spot prices, so many could be out of the money on expiry.
Open interest (OI), or the value or number of Bitcoin options contracts yet to expire, remains highest at the $60,000 strike price on Deribit, with $1.6 billion in bearish bets. Total BTC options OI across all exchanges has been climbing this month, reaching $45 billion.
“The overarching narrative for the $17B March 27 Quarterly Options Expiry at Deribit has been dictated by the headlines coming out of Washington and Tehran,” said Deribit Chief Commercial Officer Jean-David Pequignot in a note shared with CryptoPotato.
“Bitcoin’s recent surge back toward $71k was catalysed by President Trump’s decision to postpone strikes on Iranian power plants for five days. This diplomatic window expires almost perfectly in tandem with Friday’s options expiry, exacerbating a localised volatility kink in the term structure.”
“Today’s block trade data on Deribit shows that ‘smart money’ is aggressively rolling positions,” commented Greeks Live.
“Many institutions have closed out their positions expiring tomorrow and have heavily positioned themselves in out-of-the-money (OTM) call options for June and September.”
🚨 Quarterly Options Expiry Alert | 08:00 UTC Friday
$15.58B in crypto options are set to expire tomorrow on Deribit. The largest expiry in 2026 so far.$BTC: 195,398 contracts | $13.46B notional | Max pain: $75K | Put/Call: 0.61$ETH: 1,026,462 contracts | $2.12B notional |… pic.twitter.com/Ap70thX9dI— Deribit (@DeribitOfficial) March 26, 2026
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In addition to today’s batch of Bitcoin options, around 1 million Ethereum contracts are also expiring, with a notional value of $2.1 billion, max pain at $2,300, and a put/call ratio of 0.57. Total ETH options OI across all exchanges is around $9 billion.
This brings the total notional value of crypto options expiries to a whopping $15.5 billion in the largest expiry event since late December’s epic $27 billion contract expiry.
Spot Market Outlook
Spot markets are ending the week in the red with a 3% decline to $2.44 trillion in market capitalization. Bitcoin continues to weaken, falling back towards $68,000 over the past day, with a minor recovery during Asian trading on Friday morning.
Ether prices are in serious danger of dropping below $2,000 again over the weekend and were trading at $2,070 at the time of writing.
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