Bitcoin at $79,568: which levels count before Friday's options expiry

Here is what is documented: bitcoin trades at $79,568 on Tuesday morning, measured at 05:41 Central European Time on CoinGecko, and on Friday at 9 a.m. a total of 135,545 bitcoin contracts expire on the options exchange Deribit. Our reading follows further down: the expiry explains why the price has been moving in a narrow range for days, but it says nothing about the direction afterwards.

If you hold bitcoin, this is no academic question. An expiry of this size ties up capital until Friday morning that is then released, and this time it coincides with the last trading day of the month. Anyone looking to sell or add this week meets a market whose range is being held artificially tight.

The night stayed tight, $79,421 marked the low

Over the past 24 hours, bitcoin traded between $79,421 and $80,680. That is a gap of $1,259, or 1.6 percent measured against the low. For comparison: in the week before, the distance between daily high and daily low regularly exceeded $3,000. The market has not calmed down because there is nothing to trade, then, but because the hand that usually reaches in is currently tied.

Little has shifted against yesterday morning's level. Bitcoin stood at $79,978 then and at $79,568 today. That is $410 less, or 0.5 percent. The $80,000 mark, which the price briefly reclaimed over the course of Monday, again failed to hold into the evening.

The wider arc is clearer. The daily closes of the past six days read $84,082, $81,328, $81,102, $80,811, $80,049 and $80,029. Six consecutive days lower, 5.4 percent in total. From the monthly high of $86,490 on October 5, the price is now 8.0 percent away. That is a setback, but not yet a correction in the sense of the usual ten percent threshold.

135,545 bitcoin options expire on Friday at 9 a.m.

The date is fixed. Deribit, the largest exchange for crypto options, settles its monthly contracts on the last Friday of the month, this time on October 30 at 08:00 UTC. In Central European Time, that is 9 a.m. since the switch to winter time. According to the figures from the Deribit interface on Tuesday morning, 135,545 contracts are open. Each contract stands for one bitcoin, so roughly $10.8 billion at the current price.

No other date on the calendar carries more right now. The next weekly expiry on November 6 carries 13,285 contracts, the November monthly expiry 39,492. Only the annual expiry on December 25 returns to the same order of magnitude, with 135,192 contracts.

The split is lopsided. Calls account for 87,393 contracts, puts for 48,152. The put-to-call ratio stands at 0.55, so the majority of positions are betting on rising prices. That majority simply no longer matches the price.

Why the $95,000 strikes end up empty-handed

Of the 87,393 open calls, 76,112 carry a strike above the current price. That is 87.1 percent. By far the thickest block sits at $95,000 with 19,951 contracts, followed by $100,000 with 11,284 and $90,000 with 10,710. For those positions to be worth anything on Friday, bitcoin would have to rise 19 percent within three days.

The other side looks like a mirror image. Of the 48,152 puts, 39,436 sit below the current price, or 81.9 percent. The largest block sits at $70,000 with 4,352 contracts, the second largest at $75,000 with 2,993. Only 8,715 puts are in the money today.

On balance, the vast majority of both sides expires worthless. That is no accident but the normal case on an expiry day, and it is the reason why the premiums paid for weeks for price targets beyond $90,000 land in full with the sellers of those options on Friday.

How an options expiry works on the bitcoin price

The mechanism is less mysterious than it sounds. Whoever sells a call carries the risk of rising prices and hedges against it by actually holding part of the underlying amount. If the price rises towards the strike, they have to buy more; if it falls, they sell again. This running hedge generates buying and selling that has nothing to do with an opinion about bitcoin.

The closer the expiry comes, and the further the large blocks sit out of the money, the smaller that hedge becomes. At $95,000 and a price of $79,568 it is effectively zero. What remains is a narrow band around the current price in which the hedge still reacts, and that is exactly where the market has been moving for days. After Friday morning, that clamp falls away.

The second figure often quoted on such days is the computed centre of gravity, known in the market as max pain. It describes the price at which all open options together produce the smallest payout, the price, in other words, at which the buyers of those options lose the most in aggregate. For Friday's expiry, that point sits at $78,000, around 2 percent below the current price.

What matters is what this number is not. The centre of gravity is not a price target that anyone is steering towards. It follows from a calculation over the positions open today and shifts with every newly opened contract. Read as a price target, it mistakes a snapshot for an intention.

The monthly close falls on the same day

There is also a second date. October 31 is a Saturday, which makes Friday, October 30 the last trading day of the month on regulated markets. Fund houses that value and rebalance their holdings at month-end trade on that day. The options expiry at 9 a.m. and the monthly close in the evening therefore sit within one trading day.

Before that comes the US Federal Reserve meeting on Wednesday and Thursday. Three dates in three days, two of them falling on the same Friday: that explains the market's reticence better than any trend line.

How to check your holding period yourself

For investors in Germany, more than the price hangs on the moment of sale. Gains from selling crypto assets count as private disposals. What decides the outcome is how long the sold holding was held, and the relevant date is the acquisition date of each individual unit, not the moment the account was opened.

Three points count now. First, pull the list of your purchases with dates and amounts from your exchange or your wallet software. Second, assign to every planned sale the units that actually leave, because the order determines which acquisition date applies. Third, work out whether a sale this week is really necessary or whether a later date is more favourable for tax. We keep the current state of the rules and of the ongoing reform debate up to date on our page on the crypto holding period.

Anyone buying and selling on Friday to capture the move of the expiry day should also know that every repurchase restarts the clock for that holding. A daily gain of 2 percent can therefore work out more expensive than sitting still.

If you go into the expiry through leveraged products, the point to check is a different one: here it is not the acquisition date that decides but your liquidation price. Which platforms carry which fees and which margin obligations is set out in our comparison of perp DEX venues.

Our assessment: the expiry explains the range, not the direction

From the newsroom's point of view, the narrow trading range of recent days is well explained, and without any drama. Three pieces of evidence support that: the daily range of 1.6 percent against more than $3,000 in the previous week, 135,545 open contracts expiring on Friday, and a computed centre of gravity at $78,000, close to the current price.

Against it stands the fact that no direction can be derived from any of this. The positioning shows where money was placed in recent weeks, namely on $95,000 and $100,000, and those are precisely the bets that come away empty on Friday. A failed bet says nothing about what the next one will be. Add to that the central bank meeting on Wednesday, whose outcome can shift the picture entirely by Friday.

What we conclude: the calm of this week is a consequence of the calendar, not a statement about the value of bitcoin. Anyone planning a decision anyway has a market with small ranges, and correspondingly modest execution costs, until Friday morning. Anyone waiting for a breakout waits until after the expiry. This is expressly not a recommendation to buy or sell.

Friday's options expiry: $78,000 is the costliest price for holders

In summary: bitcoin stands at $79,568 on Tuesday morning, after six falling daily closes and 8.0 percent below the monthly high. On Friday at 9 a.m., 135,545 contracts expire, with 87.1 percent of the calls sitting hopelessly far above the market. The computed centre of gravity at $78,000 marks the price at which the buyers of those options come out worst in aggregate, and it sits just below today's level. The actual move begins after that.

(As of October 27, 2026. All prices in this article refer to Tuesday morning, and the open-contract figures to the same hour. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy. Crypto assets fluctuate strongly, and a total loss of the capital employed is possible.)