Roughly $14 billion of bitcoin options expire on Deribit on Friday, the largest single expiration date this year. Mauricio Di Bartolomeo, co-founder of lender Ledn, which has originated more than $10 billion in bitcoin-backed loans since 2018, argues the consequential part has already happened.
“Quarterly expirations like September’s are a two-act event,” he said.
The first act came last week, when options tied to BlackRock’s IBIT fund expired in what he calls the largest such expiration on record for the ETF. The book leaned heavily toward calls, contracts that pay off when the price rises above a set level, with maximum pain, the point at which the most contracts expire worthless, near $40 a share. Bitcoin’s run through $80,000 carried a large block of those calls above their strike prices.
The dealers who sold them sit on the losing side as the price climbs, and they cover by buying the asset. For IBIT that means buying the fund’s shares, and issuing new shares of a spot bitcoin ETF requires buying bitcoin, so the hedging reaches the coin itself.
Friday’s Deribit book inherits that setup. Di Bartolomeo points to the heavy concentrations of calls at $85,000 and $100,000 as the levels where the mechanism repeats, and bitcoin is already trading above the first of them.
