Around $14 billion of bitcoin options are going to expire on Friday, as measured by the outstanding contracts, which are known as open interest. The quarterly rollover comes amid conflicting signals on the on the potential halt to the nearly month-long Iran-US-Israel war.
The overlap is sharpening a key question for traders: whether the expiry has been artificially muting Bitcoin’s price swings and if its removal will expose the token to a sharper move driven by geopolitics.
Bitcoin has been stuck between roughly $60,000 and $75,000 in recent weeks, drifting well below its October 2025 peak of around $126,000 after a market-wide crash on Oct. 10. The lack of direction has persisted despite geopolitical tensions and intermittent inflows into US exchange-traded funds. Bitcoin fell as much as 4% to $68,122 in the US on Thursday and was trading around $68,800 early Friday in Asia.
Derivatives positioning helps explain the calm, according to market participants. Institutional investors spent much of the first quarter selling upside bets — effectively wagering that prices wouldn’t rise sharply — to generate income in a subdued market, said James Harris, chief executive officer at asset manager Tesseract. That activity shifted risk onto market makers, who have been buying on dips and selling into rallies to keep their exposure balanced.
The result has been a dampening of volatility, traders say, with price action repeatedly gravitating toward a so-called “max pain” level — the point where the largest number of options expire worthless — near $75,000. In practical terms, those hedging flows have acted like a magnet, nudging Bitcoin higher while capping gains.
Once the contracts roll off, the mechanical buying and selling tied to hedging will fade, potentially leaving Bitcoin more exposed to external catalysts. And those catalysts are mounting. On Thursday, President Donald Trump pushed back his deadline for Iran to strike a deal with the US or face more attacks, saying talks with the country were going “very well.”
The broader backdrop offers limited support. While March has seen about $1.5 billion of net inflows into Bitcoin ETFs — a stabilization after four straight months on net outflows — those allocations have proven sensitive to macro shifts. A single day in mid-March saw $163 million pulled as interest-rate expectations changed.
That fragility underscores the central takeaway from Friday’s expiry: the calm in Bitcoin may be more structural than fundamental.
With inputs from Bloomberg