Another Friday has arrived, bringing with it a fresh round of cryptocurrency options contracts set to expire while spot markets record modest gains.
Roughly 27000 Bitcoin options contracts are scheduled to expire on March 13. These contracts have a total notional value of about 1.9 billion dollars. Compared with previous weeks, this expiry event is relatively small, which suggests it is unlikely to have a significant effect on spot market prices.
Throughout most of the week, cryptocurrency prices remained largely stable. However, markets saw some improvement on Friday, with the overall market capitalization rising by about 150 billion dollars since Monday. Despite this increase, both trading volumes and volatility have remained relatively low.
Bitcoin Options Expiry Details
This week’s batch of Bitcoin options carries a put to call ratio of 0.97. This figure indicates that bullish and bearish positions are nearly balanced.
Data from Coinglass shows that the maximum pain level is around 69000 dollars, which is close to current market prices. Because of this, many options contracts could end up profitable at expiry.
Open interest, which measures the number and value of outstanding options contracts that have not yet expired, remains highest at the 60000 dollar strike price on Deribit. At this level, traders have placed about 1.7 billion dollars worth of bearish positions. Across all exchanges, total Bitcoin options open interest has been rising this month and has now reached approximately 45.5 billion dollars.
Analysts from Greeks Live noted that the market has shown signs of recovery. According to their observations, Bitcoin has managed to remain above the key psychological level of 70000 dollars and may soon attempt to test the 75000 dollar range.
The firm also observed that the forward implied volatility curve remains relatively flat beyond March. This suggests that markets are currently pricing longer term options with balanced risk expectations as sentiment across the crypto sector remains stable.
Ethereum Options Also Expiring
Alongside Bitcoin contracts, about 185000 Ethereum options contracts are also expiring today. These contracts have a notional value of around 382 million dollars.
For Ethereum, the maximum pain level is estimated at 2000 dollars, while the put to call ratio stands at 1.2. Across all exchanges, total Ethereum options open interest is currently about 7.9 billion dollars.
Together, the expiring Bitcoin and Ethereum contracts represent a combined notional value of approximately 2.3 billion dollars in crypto options.
Outlook for the Spot Market
Spot markets moved slightly higher on Friday morning during trading in Asia. The total cryptocurrency market capitalization has climbed back to around 2.5 trillion dollars, marking its highest level in about a week.
Bitcoin briefly approached 72000 dollars in early trading but encountered resistance near that level and began to pull back.
Meanwhile, Ethereum performed somewhat better, gaining about 4 percent and moving just above 2100 dollars.
Many altcoins also recorded gains during the day, including Solana, Hyperliquid, Avalanche, and Sui.
One of the biggest movers was Pi Network, whose token PI surged by about 33 percent to 0.29 dollars following its listing on Kraken.#crypto#cryptonews https://t.me/coinsignalpublic https://coinsignals.net
