35% of Deribit’s Bitcoin options open interest is set to expire October 30

About 35% of all Bitcoin options open interest on Deribit is tied to a single date: October 30. That works out to a notional value of approximately $10.7 to $11.3 billion, all scheduled to settle at 08:00 UTC that morning. For context, that makes it the largest single expiry cluster on the platform. It is bigger than the December 25 contracts, which usually get top billing as the holiday blockbuster of the options calendar. What traders are betting on The single largest strike concentration is the October 30 $95,000 call, which holds roughly 24,000 BTC of open interest. With Bitcoin trading near $86,000, that strike alone represents roughly $2.1 billion in notional value. A call option pays off if the price rises above a set level, so a crowd at $95,000 is a crowd expecting a meaningful move higher. The put-to-call ratio sits somewhere between 0.4 and 0.51, meaning there are roughly two calls for every put on this expiry. For the October 30 expiry, max-pain levels are identified at around $78,000 to $79,000. That is below where Bitcoin currently trades, which creates an awkward gap between where buyers want the price to go and where sellers would profit most. How big is this, reall...