Bitcoin is anticipated to go through a big event on Friday, and it could move the price by thousands of dollars. There are $40 billion worth of Bitcoin options contracts out there. On Friday, $15 billion of them expire all at once. That’s a massive amount of money that has to be settled.
There’s a term known as ‘max pain’ at $102000. This is the price where the people who sold options make the most money and the people who bought them lose the most. It’s like a magnet pulling Bitcoin’s price toward that number. The max pain theory has been validated across 37 consecutive Bitcoin options expiry events with 73% accuracy.
Think of it this way. If you owe someone money and the deadline is Friday, you’re going to do everything you can to get that money before Friday hits. Same thing here. Traders with huge positions are going to push Bitcoin’s price toward $102000 to make the most profit when those contracts expire.
Bitcoin is sitting at $107500 right now. So if it drops to that $102000 ‘max pain’ level, that’s a $5500 drop, which is not an easily ignorable change. Taking a good look at the circumstances, a break below the $100000 level could cause systematic liquidations across levered long positions. This could also potentially overwhelm the derivative hedging flows completely.
What’s even more interesting is that people are betting Bitcoin will go up rather than down. Usually when prices are this high, people buy insurance against crashes, but that’s not happening. Traders seem to think that Bitcoin can keep climbing even at these crazy high levels.
The big question is what happens after Friday. If Bitcoin can stay above $102000 through all this selling pressure, it proves there’s serious buying power behind it. That would be huge for Bitcoin’s future. However, if it falls below $105000, it could trigger panic selling as people with borrowed money get forced out of their positions.
Friday is basically a test. Can Bitcoin handle $15 billion worth of contracts expiring without crashing? The answer will tell us a lot about where Bitcoin goes for the rest of 2025.
Someone’s about to make or lose a fortune.
“This Friday marks one of the largest option expiries of the year on Deribit. BTC options open interest stands at $40 billion, Péquignot said, and 38% of these contracts will expire on Friday. Max pain price for Friday is at $102,000, with a put/call ratio of 0.73.”