The Impact of August 2025 Bitcoin & Ethereum Options Expiry
The August 2025 Bitcoin and Ethereum options expiry emerged as a pivotal stress test for the crypto derivatives market, with $15 billion in notional value—$11.7 billion in Bitcoin and $3.2 billion in Ethereum—expiring on August 29 [1]. This event exposed the intricate interplay between institutional positioning, market psychology, and macroeconomic forces, offering a window into how crypto assets behave under derivatives-driven volatility.
Institutional Positioning: Hedging and Speculation in a High-Stakes Environment
Institutions adopted a dual strategy of hedging and speculation to navigate the expiry. For Bitcoin, the bearish bias—evidenced by a put/call ratio of 1.31 and max pain at $116,000—prompted heavy use of…
