Journalist
Posted:
A major event came and went, and the crypto market barely reacted.
About 150,000 Bitcoin on November 28 [BTC] options ($13.4 billion) and 573,000 Ethereum [ETH] options ($1.7 billion) expired, bringing the total to $15.4 billion. In short, this marked an important ending to the end of the month.
The interesting part? Positions were very concentrated: BTC’s Put/Call ratio reached 0.58, meaning more longs than shorts, with a maximum pain around $100,000. ETH was perfectly balanced with a put/call ratio of 1.0, with a maximum pain of $3.4k.
Source: Deribit
And yet, despite the magnitude of the expiration, the market barely moved.
From a technical perspective, Bitcoin closed at $90,955, with a high of $93,000, remaining below the maximum pain level. For context, maximum pain is the price at which option sellers (shorts) would sell BTC to limit their losses.
In this case, sellers did not have to increase the price as BTC remained below $100,000, and the market remained relatively calm. So the real question is: did this stability demonstrate Bitcoin’s underlying strength?
Clean flush and gentle decline to Bitcoin bottom
The market is still trying to decide if Bitcoin has truly bottomed out.
In this context, BitMEX founder Arthur Hayes said argued that BTC may have found a bottom at $80,000 during the last sale. He based this view on the possibility that the Fed is about to end its quantitative tightening cycle.
At the same time, CryptoQuant noted that the market just experienced the largest open interest wipeout of this cycle. A sharp reset from about $45 billion to $28 billion, flushing out many overheated positions.
Source: TradingView (BTC/USDT)
Simply put, the market just had a cleanse.
With that backdrop, the expiration of $15 billion Bitcoin and Ethereum options came at a time when leverage had already been exhausted. This in turn helps explain why the event came and went with hardly any volatility.
At the same time, BTC, which held around $90,000 in a risky environment even with a maximum pain threshold of $100,000, showed that sellers did not have to cut prices, and buyers still intervened to defend the support.
In this context, this resilience could be an early sign of a Bitcoin bottom.
Final thoughts
- Despite the massive decline in BTC and ETH, the market barely moved, showing low volatility as leverage had already been removed.
- Bitcoin remained around $90,000, below the maximum pain ($100,000), indicating that buyers were defending support and the market may be forming a bottom.