Bitcoin faces $16 billion options expiry Friday, then two more tests hit the rally

Bitcoin options carrying roughly $16 billion in notional value expire on Deribit at 08:00 UTC on Friday, Sept. 25. Calls account for about $9.6 billion of that open interest and puts for about $6.4 billion.

Bitcoin trades near $86,300 heading into the settlement, after climbing above $85,000 this week. Two US economic releases and the expiry of CME's September Bitcoin futures follow within seven hours, stacking three separate tests into one trading day.

The equity side settled first

Ledn co-founder Mauricio Di Bartolomeo sees Friday as the second half of an expiry cycle that began on Wall Street.

He said in a note to CryptoSlate that quarterly expirations like September's are a two-act event. Options on BlackRock's iShares Bitcoin Trust expired last week in IBIT's largest single expiration on record, and he described the book as heavily tilted toward calls.

In his account, Bitcoin's rally through $80,000 pushed many of those calls into the money, and dealers short those contracts bought IBIT shares to stay hedged.

Di Bartolomeo argued that this demand reached Bitcoin itself once it grew large enough to require new IBIT shares, a process that pulls spot Bitcoin into the fund through authorized participants. He expects the Deribit book to inherit the same setup.