#比特币与黄金战争 December 26, 2025, at 16:00, a rare large-scale options expiration event occurred in the crypto market. The scale of this expiration is unprecedented in the industry—BTC options with a notional value between $23.6 billion and $23.8 billion, roughly equivalent to 300,000 contracts. It’s worth noting that this volume accounts for more than half of the total open interest in Bitcoin options on Deribit, the largest crypto options platform globally. Coupled with Ethereum options expirations, the total notional value of crypto options expiring surged to between $27.4 billion and $28.5 billion, more than doubling compared to the same period last year.

Looking at the strike price distribution, market participants’ views are quite interesting. The two most concentrated strike prices for BTC options are $85,200 puts and $100,000 calls. The maximum pain point is around $96,000, where option buyers face the most severe losses, while sellers, mainly large institutions and market makers, are the happiest. In terms of open interest ratios, the put/call ratio is only 38%, indicating that the overall market remains bullish on BTC.

The market environment on expiration day was somewhat complex. BTC hovered narrowly around $87,000, having already fallen below the 365-day moving average at $102,000, which is being strongly resisted by the downward trend line extending from the October high of $126,000. Additionally, due to the Christmas holiday, European and American institutional investors were on vacation, causing market liquidity to dry up. This low liquidity environment significantly amplified the volatility risk associated with the expiration. Just before expiration, there was a shocking flash crash—some major platform’s BTC/USD price plummeted from $87,600 to $24,100, then quickly rebounded. Such extreme market moves can be truly frightening.

Regarding the impact of expiration, market makers had already hedged their options positions earlier by establishing offsetting positions in spot and futures markets. This large-scale expiration forced them to significantly unwind their hedges, a process that can easily trigger sharp price swings in BTC. The market generally considers the $80,000–$82,000 range as an important support level. From another perspective, the implied volatility of Bitcoin over the past month has fallen by more than 10%, indicating that the market has gradually digested the risk. Most institutions had already adjusted their positions in advance, so the mainstream view is that this expiration is likely to cause only a short-term wave of volatility rather than develop into a trend-driven one-sided market. Over the next two weeks, the market may exhibit low volatility with a slow downward drift.

Overall, this wave of market movement is more likely to be characterized by an initial rise followed by consolidation and gradual decline. The overall outlook remains cautiously optimistic. $BTC