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$10.8 Billion in Bitcoin Options Expire Friday. Max Pain Sits Where Recent Buyers Paid

NodeWitness Team 6 min read

Friday's bitcoin options expiry is the largest until Christmas, and its max-pain price falls inside the band where the market has done most of its recent buying. The on-chain picture also shows veteran holders handing coins to newcomers ahead of a week packed with macro risk.

Roughly 135,500 bitcoin options worth about $10.8 billion in notional value are set to expire on Deribit on Friday, October 30, according to the exchange's public market data as read by NodeWitness on Tuesday [1]. That single date carries 34% of all open bitcoin options on the venue, with the December 25 quarterly, at about 135,300 contracts, the only one close in size [1].

Max pain, the settlement price at which option buyers as a group would collect the least, stands at $78,000. That was 2.1% below Deribit's index of $79,633 at the time [1]. Settlement does not use a single print. Deribit averages its BTC index from 07:30 to 08:00 UTC, sampling every four seconds, and pays out in cash [2].

The expiry lands two days after the Federal Reserve's rate decision on Wednesday, October 28 [8], and a day after September's PCE inflation data on Thursday [9].

A flat valley, not a magnet

Max pain gets quoted far more than it deserves. On Tuesday's open interest, a settlement at $78,000 would pay option holders about $126 million in total. At $75,000 it would be $135 million, and at $81,000 about $136 million, based on NodeWitness calculations from Deribit data [1]. That spread is under $10 million on an expiry worth nearly $11 billion. The bill only climbs steeply above $84,000, reaching $168 million there and $305 million at $90,000 [1].

"Max pain is a wide valley, not a magnet," wrote Base Camp, which arrived at a near-identical payout curve [3]. CryptoWatchDesk, running its own numbers from Deribit's open interest, called it "a convention, not a force" [4].

Options traders are not pricing much drama either. Implied volatility on contracts nearest the money was about 36% annualized on Tuesday, consistent with a move of roughly 3.3%, or about $2,600 either way, by Friday's settlement [1].

Calls far away, puts as insurance

Calls outnumber puts by almost two to one, 87,399 against 48,107 BTC [1]. The largest strike is $95,000, with 20,152 BTC of open interest, nearly all calls, 19% above the index. The $100,000 and $90,000 strikes come next. Altogether, 58,784 BTC of calls are struck at $90,000 or higher, two-thirds of all calls in the expiry [1].

Puts cluster below the market. Some 85% of them sit at $80,000 or lower, and 33,258 BTC at $75,000 or lower [1]. Open interest does not reveal intent, and a call can be a bet, a hedge or one leg of a spread. It does show that, with bitcoin anywhere near current levels, most calls will expire worthless.

Where the chain says buyers paid

Options settle off-chain, but cost basis lives on it. In our node's UTXO snapshot of October 25, 1.41 million BTC carried a cost basis between $75,820, the short-term holder average, and $81,300 [5]. Bitcoin was trading inside that band when this piece was published on October 27, as it had been since Saturday, and the max-pain strike sits in the middle of it.

The distribution around $78,000 shows what is at stake. At that price, 38.2% of evaluable supply would be held at a loss, against 35.9% at $80,000 [5]. About 451,000 BTC have a cost basis between those two levels. The heavier layer is overhead, where 2.26 million BTC were acquired between $80,000 and $85,000, roughly three-quarters of them by short-term holders, and are underwater at today's price [5].

That leaves recent buyers exposed. Slightly more than half of all short-term holder coins, 1.91 million out of 3.75 million BTC, have a cost basis above $80,000 [5][6].

Veterans keep distributing

Long-term holders, coins unmoved for more than 155 days, held 16.35 million BTC in the October 25 snapshot, down from 16.41 million a week earlier, a drop of about 60,000 BTC [6]. Short-term holder supply rose by roughly 63,000 BTC over the same week. Among weeks with comparable snapshots, it is the largest weekly decline in long-term holder supply since November 2025, though the weekly series has a gap from mid-June to October 18 [6].

The shift lines up with October 22, when coins moving on-chain realized $3.75 billion in profit, the most since February, and a lot of old coins changed hands [7]. Our node cannot tell who is selling, and some of those transfers may be internal moves by custodians or exchanges. The pattern still fits veterans cashing in near $84,000-$85,000 and new buyers stepping in at those prices.

None of this says where the index will settle on Friday. It does show the expiry arriving with price sitting in the thickest layer of recent cost basis, and with a large share of those buyers already under water. The Fed and the PCE print are likely to matter more than options arithmetic.

Track the data on our supply in loss by price, URPD and short- and long-term holder realized price charts. What the chain showed as bitcoin lost $80,000 is in Monday's analysis, and how rates reach bitcoin is in our macro and Fed piece. More on prices lives in our Market section.

Sources

Source type in brackets. All times UTC. Web pages accessed on October 26, 2026; Deribit API read on October 27.

  1. Deribit, public API (public/get_book_summary_by_currency, BTC options), read at 06:43 UTC on October 27, 2026. Open interest by strike for the 30OCT26 expiry, index at $79,633, mark implied volatility. Max pain, payout curve and implied move calculated by NodeWitness. (Primary, exchange data with own calculation)
  2. Deribit Support, Settlement. Cash settlement and delivery price as a TWAP of the index from 07:30 to 08:00 UTC, sampled every four seconds. (Primary, official documentation)
  3. Base Camp, VikingXBT, Bitcoin Options Expiry: Nearly $12B Expires Friday With Max Pain at $78K, October 25, 2026. Payout curve and max-pain quote. (Secondary, market analysis)
  4. CryptoWatchDesk, Joaquín Larrabure, Bitcoin week ahead: Fed 28 Oct, $10.9B options expiry 30 Oct, October 25, 2026. Strike breakdown and max-pain quote. (Secondary, trade press)
  5. NodeWitness, supply in loss by price, snapshot at block 973,007 (October 25, 2026), out of 20.01 million evaluable BTC. Supply with cost basis above $75,820, $78,000, $80,000, $81,300 and $85,000, total and short-term. (Primary, own data)
  6. NodeWitness, cohort supply and realized prices from UTXO-set snapshots at blocks 971,930 (October 18) and 973,007 (October 25, 2026), 155-day threshold. Long-term holder supply of 16,408,020 and 16,348,074 BTC; short-term holder supply of 3,754,846 BTC. No weekly snapshots between June 14 and October 18. (Primary, own data)
  7. NodeWitness, daily on-chain series (/api/node/onchain-daily) recalculated from our node's blocks through block 973,312 (October 26, 2026). Realized profit on October 22. (Primary, own data)
  8. Federal Reserve, October 2026 calendar. October 27-28 meeting, statement at 2:00 p.m. and press conference at 2:30 p.m. ET. (Primary, official)
  9. Bureau of Economic Analysis, Release Schedule. Personal Income and Outlays for September 2026, October 29 at 8:30 a.m. ET. (Primary, official)

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Last updated: October 27, 2026