Ethereum price prediction: 68,199 puts in the money before the 9 a.m. expiry

Here is what is documented: on Friday, October 30, 333,649 Ethereum options expire on Deribit at 08:00 UTC, which is 9 a.m. in Frankfurt. That is 20.3 percent of all open contracts and, at an index level of $2,242.52, around $748 million in notional value. Our own read follows further down: the expiry does not explain the direction of the price, only why so little resistance is showing up.

Ethereum trades at $2,243 on Friday morning. Overnight the price fell as far as $2,170, and the session high so far is $2,254 (Kraken, as of October 30, shortly before 7 a.m. UTC). Since October 1, when the month opened at $2,684, 16.4 percent has gone. For where the price can point over a horizon of months, see our Ethereum price prediction.

333,649 contracts settle at 9 a.m., a fifth of open interest

We pulled the options book on Friday morning at around 6:45 a.m. UTC from Deribit's public options statistics and counted it ourselves. Open interest across all Ethereum expiries stands at 1,645,955 contracts. Of those, 333,649 run out today, or 20.3 percent. One contract represents one ether.

For a sense of scale: Bitcoin settles 134,238 contracts at the same expiry, which because of the higher unit price amounts to $10.52 billion. Measured in dollars, the Bitcoin expiry is therefore around fourteen times the size of the Ethereum one. Measured as a share of each market, the two dates are comparably heavy.

The monthly expiry on the last Friday is the largest regular date outside a quarter end. Saturday, October 31, by contrast carries only 39,055 contracts and barely registers.

68,199 puts in the money against 8,611 calls

An option is in the money when it has a value at settlement. For a put, that means a strike above the price; for a call, a strike below it. At $2,242.52 the split looks like this: 68,199 puts are in the money and 8,611 calls. The ratio is almost eight to one.

Across all strikes the book leans the other way. Open interest is 199,995 calls against 133,654 puts, a put-call ratio of 0.668. Calls are in the majority, but nearly all of them sit too far above the price to be worth anything.

The single largest position of this expiry is the $2,600 call with 37,506 contracts, 18.8 percent of all calls in this date. It expires worthless today unless Ethereum rises 16 percent in two hours. A buyer who paid the premium in September loses it in full.

Why 77 percent of all contracts expire worthless today

Of the 333,649 contracts in this expiry, 256,839 end without value, or 77.0 percent. For calls the share is 95.7 percent, for puts 49.0 percent. The 68,199 puts in the money carry a combined notional value of $153 million.

That has one consequence for the price which the headline hides: a holder of a put in the money already has the hedge in hand. They do not need to sell anything in the market, they receive the difference in cash. Selling pressure on an expiry day does not come from the options themselves, but from the unwinding of the offsetting positions that dealers hold in the spot market to hedge.

Bitcoin settles on its calculated point, Ethereum $157 below

Max pain is the strike at which the sum of all payouts to option buyers is smallest. We calculated it for both books from the same raw data: for every strike, the payout of all contracts added up, then the minimum.

For Ethereum it sits at $2,400. The price stands at $2,242.52 and therefore $157.48, or 6.6 percent, below. For Bitcoin it sits at $78,000, with the index at $78,346, or 0.44 percent above. Bitcoin runs into settlement practically on its calculated point, Ethereum well off it.

That is not a law of nature but an observation with a known weakness: max pain pulls prices only when dealers actively rebalance their offsetting positions, and with thin books they hardly do. At $748 million in notional against $10.5 billion on the Bitcoin side, the Ethereum book is the thinner one at this expiry.

$165 lower than in our preview of October 23

We already ran the numbers on this expiry on October 23. At the time 322,586 contracts were open, max pain sat at $2,500 and Ethereum at $2,407.76. Our preview closed with the line that below $2,400 the picture turns. That is exactly what happened.

Three numbers have shifted since. Open interest for today rose by 11,063 contracts to 333,649. Max pain slipped $100 to $2,400. And the price lost $165.24, or 6.9 percent. The detail of that earlier calculation is in our preview of the expiry from October 23.

The break came on Thursday evening. After the attack on a Binance hot wallet, Ethereum fell from a session high of $2,376.99 to $2,230.19 and closed at $2,249.01 (Kraken, daily candle for October 29). Binance now puts a figure on the damage itself and has pre-emptively halted withdrawals for individual networks; for Ethereum they continue, according to the exchange. Our running coverage is in our overview of the paused withdrawals of October 29.

The sentiment index falls from 51 to 30 within a day

The Fear and Greed Index from Alternative.me stands at 30 points on October 30, which puts it in fear territory. On October 28 and 29 it was still at 51 points, or neutral. A jump of 21 points in a single day is rare and mainly measures the volatility and trading volume of the past 24 hours, not a survey of investors. The methodology is on the index's own page.

For the expiry day that means one thing above all: the implied volatility priced into the options has risen lately. More expensive hedging is the reason the ratio of puts in the money comes out so lopsided.

After settlement, little is left on the futures market until late November

After today's date the rest of open interest is spread out as follows: 39,055 contracts on October 31, 44,767 on November 6, 46,236 on November 13 and 180,986 on November 27, the next monthly expiry. The largest single date of the year remains December 25 with 612,234 contracts, 37.2 percent of total open interest.

Between 9 a.m. today and November 27 there are four weeks in which no date of any weight is due on the futures market. Traders who pinned the moves of recent days on the expiry get a clean control test from Monday.

The day's range runs between $2,170 and $2,254

To the downside the overnight low at $2,170 is the first documented level. Below that comes $2,000, the strike with the highest open interest among the puts of the next date, 6,223 contracts for October 31. To the upside the session high at $2,254 caps the move, then max pain at $2,400.

All three levels are figures derived from the market, not a forecast. They work for placing your own position, not for deriving a direction.

Holding period and loss offsetting: where German investors stand

Private sales of crypto assets in Germany fall under Section 23 of the Income Tax Act. After a holding period of one year the gain is tax free; below that, an exemption limit of 1,000 euros a year applies. A buyer who entered on October 30, 2025 paid $3,802.67 per ether (Kraken, daily close). That position turned one year old today and is no longer taxable on a sale, but it is also 41 percent under water.

The reverse also holds: losses from sales inside the one-year window can only be offset against gains from other private disposals, not against wages or investment income. Investors who realised gains on short-term sales this year can net them off until December 31. For the tools that track holding periods per purchase cleanly, see our hub on crypto tax software and portfolio trackers.

On the political state of the one-year rule, which has been up for discussion for months, we keep a page of its own: crypto holding period, reform and current status. As long as nothing new appears there, the rule stands unchanged.

One note on the futures market itself: Deribit is not a regular route for retail investors from Germany, and the exchange does not readily take clients from the European Economic Area. The numbers in this article are to be read as market information, not as a guide to trading options. For leveraged positions in Europe, the regulated venues are in the perpetuals hub further down.

Our view: the expiry does not explain the slide

Our read: today's date is a sideshow, and the numbers say so themselves. Three pieces of evidence point that way. First, at $748 million the Ethereum book is small against the $10.5 billion on the Bitcoin side. Second, 77.0 percent of the contracts are already out of the money, their hedges long unwound. Third, the price sits 6.6 percent below max pain, and no pull has shown up anywhere in the past two trading days.

One point argues the other way and deserves to be taken seriously: a large part of the 68,199 puts in the money came into being in the past 48 hours, when hedging turned expensive. Whoever sold them holds the offsetting position in the spot market and unwinds it after 9 a.m. That can work in both directions in the short term. It cannot be forecast with any confidence, and we therefore do not claim it.

What does explain the slide sits one floor up: a security incident at the largest exchange, a sentiment index that loses 21 points in a day, and a month that has cost Ethereum 16.4 percent. How the ratio to Bitcoin developed in the process is what we wrote down on October 29 in our calculation of the ETH/BTC ratio.

October 30 expiry: with no anchor, the $2,170 level decides

Three steps into the weekly close:

1. Check your own holding period. Every purchase before October 30, 2025 is out of the one-year window. For the tools that track that per position, see the hub on crypto tax software and portfolio trackers.
2. Measure leveraged positions against $2,170. The overnight low is the next documented level to the downside. Where your own liquidation price sits in relation to it is shown by your exchange's position screen; the regulated venues are in the hub on perpetual exchanges.
3. Check where your coins are held. Holders of ether on an exchange should know which deposit and withdrawal routes are open there right now. The comparison of trading venues is in the hub on crypto exchanges.

(As of October 30, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)