$2.5B Bitcoin call spread nears July 31 expiry

Two weekly options expiries settled without producing sustained price movement in Bitcoin, which remained near $64,000 as a roughly $2.5 billion call spread for the July 31 monthly expiry approaches.

About 19,000 Bitcoin options referencing roughly $1.2 billion of notional expired at 08:00 UTC last Friday on Deribit. The exchange calculated a max-pain level for that expiry at $64,500; Bitcoin closed the day around $64,140. The prior Friday’s expiry of similar size had a max-pain level at $63,000 and was followed by a move toward $65,400. Max pain is the price at which option sellers would owe the least money at settlement and is a snapshot of where open bets are concentrated.

Exchange-wide fills showed selling pressure on Thursday and Friday, with sellers crossing the spread to get filled. Coinbase’s premium index registered a 0.088% discount on Friday, the widest since July 16, indicating reduced demand from U.S. spot buyers. Leveraged long positions were liquidated for about $45.9 million on Friday, compared with $7.4 million on the short side. Funding rates across exchanges averaged 0.0038% on Friday, down from 0.0064% five days earlier. Open interest across futures and perpetuals finished at $22.35 billion, slightly higher than a week earlier.

Deribit’s chief commercial officer Jean-David Péquignot described a single block trade that bought 20,000 calls at the $70,000 strike and sold 20,000 calls at $72,000 for the July 31 expiry. The two legs represent about $2.5 billion in gross notional across both sides and sit among nearly $5 billion of open interest at those strikes on Deribit, roughly 18% of the exchange’s $28 billion Bitcoin options book. The structure pays out if Bitcoin finishes above $70,000 and stops paying additional gains after $72,000; selling the higher strike offsets part of the premium.

Deribit’s probability model placed the chance of Bitcoin touching $70,000 during July at about 14.5% and touching $72,000 at about 4.1%. The July 31 expiry comes 48 hours after the Federal Reserve’s July 28–29 meeting, where the FOMC statement will be the primary communication; markets assign roughly a one-in-three probability to a quarter-point rate increase at that meeting.

Options data indicate concentrated gamma exposure at $65,000 and $72,000, with the nearer cluster small and the larger cluster farther from the market. Market participants linked some of the July 31 call demand to expectations around legislation affecting the industry; probability markets for passage of the CLARITY Act have declined to about 35% from higher levels earlier in the year.

Ethereum contributed roughly $234 million to Friday’s expiries, with a put-call ratio of 1.29. U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs showed a brief outflow of $225.2 million on Thursday, with BlackRock’s IBIT accounting for $202.5 million of that reversal; ETF flows for the week finished positive by about $274 million.

Volatility measures moved lower into the weekend: the Crypto Fear & Greed Index fell to 28 and implied volatility drifted toward 35%. Renewed tensions between the U.S. and Iran coincided with declines in equities and a modest drag on crypto markets. The timing of the July 31 options expiry follows the Fed meeting and precedes an August Senate recess that shortens the window for legislative action.