Crypto Market Bearish Amidst Expired BTC, ETH Options
The crypto market dropped by 2.67% in the last 24 hours to $2.28 trillion, primarily driven by a hotter-than-expected U.S. inflation report. The January U.S. PPI rose 0.5% month-over-month, significantly above the 0.3% forecast, with Core PPI jumping 0.8%.
This data dampened expectations for near-term Federal Reserve rate cuts, increasing the appeal of traditional safe havens like gold while triggering a selloff in rate-sensitive assets, including crypto.
Market sentiment remains deeply negative, with the Fear & Greed Index stuck at “Extreme Fear” (16). Concurrently, total derivatives open interest fell 4.9% in 24h, indicating traders are closing speculative positions and reducing systemic risk.
The market’s decline is fundamentally driven by renewed inflation anxiety, exacerbated by fragile sentiment and deleveraging. The path forward likely hinges on whether macro headwinds persist or abate.
Elsewhere, a very large batch of Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH) options, with roughly $8–$9 billion in notional value, is expiring and concentrating near-term market risk in a single session.
Reports put the current monthly expiry at about $8.3 billion in BTC and ETH options combined, including over 109,000 BTC contracts ($7.38 billion) and 474,000 ETH contracts (~$964 million).
Options expiry matters because dealers and large traders rebalance hedges aggressively as contracts roll off. If price trades far from max pain, hedging flows can either push it toward that level or, once expiry passes, remove an anchor and let spot move more freely.
ETF holders and corporate treasuries have also accumulated large six- to twelve-month $60k BTC puts as insurance, which keeps downside protection in focus as ETF holders stack up protection at $60k.
Price action around expiry can be choppy, with fast swings if BTC approaches levels where dealers are short gamma (typically near big put clusters such as $60k).
Once today’s contracts settle, a large chunk of open interest disappears, and the “next big one” becomes the late March expiry, where BTC shows concentrated call interest at 80–90 thousand and ETH has notable calls around 3,500, signalling medium-term upside bets.
At the same time, implied volatility and funding rates will show whether traders redeploy leverage or stay defensive. Macro prints (like U.S. inflation and jobs data) and spot ETF flows can either reinforce downside hedging or support a base-building narrative. MOFI to Pay Final Dividend to Shareholders
