Bitcoin settled Friday’s $10.92 billion Deribit options expiry at $78,119, almost exactly on the $78,000 max pain level, after the $6.36 billion Binance hack knocked it from $80,850 to a $76,500 low overnight.
That low touched BTC’s 200-day EMA, the long-term trend line, to within $32. BTC trades at $77,620, down 3.2% in 24 hours, and the Fear & Greed Index fell from 51 to 30 in a day.
With about a third of Deribit’s open interest now gone, the options market is lighter than it has been all month. The next large date is November 27, when $3.55 billion expires with max pain at $80,000.
How Did Bitcoin React to the Binance Hack?
The drop came in two legs. BTC opened the 20:00 UTC hour on Thursday at $80,850 and hit $78,297 within minutes as news of the Binance breach spread, a 3.2% fall. It bounced, then slid again after 23:00 UTC and printed its $76,500 low just after 02:00 UTC on Friday, 5.4% below where the hour began.
Forced selling did much of the work. CoinGlass data showed $1.55 billion of crypto positions liquidated in 24 hours, 83.6% of them longs, with $501.6 million in BTC alone.
The positioning since then is mixed:
Measure | Before the hack | At the low | Now |
|---|---|---|---|
OKX long/short account ratio | 2.23 | 2.72 | 2.46 |
OKX BTC open interest | $3.52B | $3.73B | $3.60B |
Deribit DVOL (implied volatility) | 37.0 | 42.0 | 38.7 |
Fear & Greed Index | 51 | — | 30 |
Smaller accounts bought the dip: the share of OKX accounts that are long jumped as the price fell, and open interest rose by about $210 million into the low. Funding on OKX’s BTC perpetual stayed positive throughout, so longs are still paying shorts.
Implied volatility told a more cautious story. Deribit’s DVOL index, which tracks the 30-day volatility options traders are pricing in, jumped from 37 before the hack to 42 just before midnight UTC and has only eased back to 38.7.
What Happened at the Options Expiry?
About 135,000 BTC of options expired on Deribit at 08:00 UTC on Friday, the last Friday of the month, when monthly contracts settle. Max pain, the strike where the most options expire worthless, sat at $78,000. Deribit settled the contracts at $78,119.01.
The book was heavily tilted toward calls. Deribit data reported before the expiry put the put/call ratio at 0.53, close to two calls for every put. With BTC settling just above $78,000, most of those calls, bets that BTC would be higher by the end of October, expired worthless.
Once the expiry cleared, Deribit’s BTC options open interest stood at 285,073 BTC, or about $22.1 billion, as of 11:17 UTC.
BTC options notional by Deribit expiry as of 11:17 UTC on October 30, 2026. Source: Deribit.
The Next Expiries to Watch
November 6 ($1.29 billion): max pain is $80,000. The biggest call blocks sit at $90,000 and $95,000, and the biggest puts at $74,000 and $76,000.
November 27 ($3.55 billion): the next monthly. Max pain is again $80,000 and the put/call ratio is 0.66. The $90,000 call holds 4,293 BTC of open interest, and the $75,000 put holds 2,447 BTC.
December 25 ($10.54 billion): the quarterly, nearly as large as Friday’s expiry, with max pain at $75,000.
Max pain isn’t a forecast; BTC often settles far from it. But the November levels frame the range traders are betting on: puts clustered at $74,000 to $76,000, right around the 200-day EMA, and calls stacked from $90,000 up.
One more sign of caution: in the 24 hours to 11:17 UTC on Friday, Deribit traders bought 1.63 BTC of puts for every BTC of calls, the reverse of the call-heavy book that just expired.
Bitcoin Price Analysis: The 200-Day EMA Holds, for Now
On the daily chart since early August, BTC is back where it spent most of September: between its 200-day EMA at $76,468 and its 50-day EMA at $80,593. Friday’s low wick stopped $32 above the 200-day line, which BTC has closed above every day since its late-August breakout.
August 2 to October 30, 2026: BTCUSDT 1D chart. Source: Binance.
The levels line up with the options book:
Resistance: $80,000 is the round number, the November max pain, and only $593 below the 50-day EMA. Above it, $81,971 is Thursday’s high, set four hours before the hack.
Support: $76,500 is Friday’s low on top of the 200-day EMA. Below it, $75,000 is the September 15 low ($74,968) and the largest put strike for November 27.
BTC has tested this 200-day zone before. In mid-September, it dipped to $74,968, held, and ran to $87,395 within a week. Friday’s buyers are betting on the same bounce, as the OKX long/short ratio shows.
Scenario | Condition | Where it could lead |
|---|---|---|
Advance | A daily close back above $80,593, the 50-day EMA | $81,971, then $84,898, the October 21 high |
Pause | BTC holds between $76,468 and $80,000 while Binance withdrawals reopen | Chop around $78,000 into the November 6 expiry |
Retreat | A daily close below the 200-day EMA at $76,468 | $75,000, then $73,000, where the August breakout began |
For Bitcoin, the next test is Binance itself. If withdrawals reopen smoothly within the promised 48 hours, the call-heavy positioning that just expired worthless could rebuild toward the $90,000 strikes. If they don’t, the puts at $74,000 to $76,000 are where traders have already placed their bets.
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