The most popular bullish strike on Deribit shifted from $80,000 to $70,000 over the past several months, a quiet repricing that predates this week’s headline trade. Max pain levels across Der
Bitcoin sits near $64,500, roughly 12% above the $57,800 low it touched on July 1, and most coverage of this week’s options flow has focused on a single large trade. The more revealing story sits underneath that trade. For six months, the single most popular bullish bet on Deribit was the $80,000 call – a contract that pays off only if Bitcoin trades above that level by its expiry date. Sometime in the past few weeks, that changed. Data from Deribit Metrics now shows the $70,000 call has taken over as the largest position on the exchange, with $1.63 billion in open interest, while $80,000 has slipped to second place and $72,000 sits third. Traders did not stop believing Bitcoin could climb. They lowered how far they are willing to bet it climbs.
Open interest measures how much money sits locked into contracts at a given strike price, and watching where that money concentrates over time works like a slow-motion poll of what professional traders actually expect, as distinct from what they say publicly. Six months ago, that poll pointed to $80,000. Today it points to $70,000, a full $10,000 lower, even though Bitcoin’s spot price during that window has moved in the opposite direction, recovering from below $58,000 back above $64,000. That divergence matters. A market getting more bullish on price while simultaneously getting less ambitious about how high calls should target is a market bracing for a grind, not a breakout.
Deribit’s own metrics page shows the shape of that repricing directly. The tallest bar on the open interest distribution now sits at the $70,000 call with roughly 35,000 contracts, followed by $72,000, while $80,000 has visibly thinned out. Total open interest across BTC options stands at 407,786 contracts, worth over $26.3 billion in notional value, with calls outnumbering puts 279,732 to 128,054 – a put/call ratio of 0.46. That two-to-one tilt toward calls shows a market still leaning bullish overall, just with noticeably smaller ambitions attached to the bets.
Put options tell a similar story from the other direction. The most actively traded downside bet on Deribit sits at the $60,000 strike, just below current spot price, which functions as a form of insurance against the rally reversing rather than a bet that it will.
MetricSix Months AgoNow (mid-July 2026)Most popular call strike$80,000$70,000 ($1.63B open interest)Most popular put strike$60,000$60,000 (unchanged)Bitcoin spot priceRoughly $58,000-62,000 rangeApproximately $64,500Options traders track a figure called max pain, the strike price at which the largest possible number of outstanding contracts would expire worthless, inflicting maximum financial loss on option buyers as a group. Rather than a price prediction, max pain works as a gravity marker showing where dealer hedging naturally pulls price as an expiry date nears. Across Deribit, Binance, and OKX, max pain levels for near-term contracts currently cluster between $60,000 and $65,000, a tight range sitting almost exactly where Bitcoin already trades. When max pain and spot price converge that closely, it typically means positioning has thinned out and few large one-sided bets remain uncovered, which cuts two ways. Thinner positioning means less fuel for a violent liquidation cascade in either direction, but it also means the market currently reflects reduced conviction rather than a coiled spring waiting to release.
Longer-dated contracts complicate that picture. The September 2026 Deribit expiry alone carries $7.53 billion in notional value with a max pain near $74,000, and the December expiry shows real open interest at both a $120,000 call and a $60,000 put simultaneously, evidence that professional desks remain split on the second half of the year even as near-term sentiment stays guarded.
The clearest sign that institutional caution runs deeper than one exchange’s order book shows up at the CME, where regulated Bitcoin options open interest has fallen from close to $290 million in November to somewhere between $30 million and $40 million by June, according to data compiled by CryptoQuant. Puts have outnumbered calls in notional value on the CME consistently since July 2025. Institutional desks that prefer working through regulated U.S. venues have been quietly stepping back from Bitcoin options altogether, even as offshore platforms like Deribit continue absorbing large flows. That split suggests the caution showing up in strike selection is not confined to any single trading culture. It runs through the regulated side of the market too, just expressed as reduced participation rather than lower strikes.
Set against that backdrop, the bull call spread built over the July 17-19 weekend looks less like an isolated bet and more like the sharpest recent expression of a pattern already in motion. Exchange data show 20,000 contracts of the $70,000 call were bought against a matching sale of 20,000 contracts at $72,000, both expiring July 31, structured to profit if Bitcoin settles at or above $72,000 while capping any gain beyond that level. In an interview with CoinDesk, Deribit’s chief commercial officer Jean-David Péquignot described the activity as “some large blocks in BTC topside call spreads,” a detail that matters because block trades are negotiated privately between large counterparties before being printed to the exchange, ruling out retail flow by definition. The strike selection lines up precisely with where open interest has already migrated over the past several months. Institutional money is not chasing a moonshot. It is buying exposure to a narrow, specific band it has been circling since the $80,000 call lost its crown as the market’s favorite bet.
The trade’s expiry lands two days after the Federal Reserve’s July 29 rate decision, adding a second layer to the timing. Fed Chair Kevin Warsh, testifying before Congress on July 14, has repeatedly framed inflation as still too high even while acknowledging growing optimism inside the Fed about AI-driven productivity gains easing price pressure over time. Fed funds futures currently price a 75-80% probability of a hold at 3.5-3.75% on July 29, a number close to consensus. What remains genuinely uncertain is whether Warsh pairs that hold with language dovish enough to justify the market’s current positioning, or reinforces the inflation caution he voiced at the ECB forum in Sintra earlier this month.
None of this positioning happens in a vacuum, and the weakest link in the bullish case has nothing to do with options at all. CryptoQuant’s July 8 research report, titled “Room to Run?“, called the recovery fragile despite Bitcoin’s 11 percent rebound off the bear market low, describing overall sentiment as still extremely bearish and identifying $60,000 as the critical support and pivot level. The firm noted total Bitcoin demand had only just recovered from its fastest contraction since 2022, after collapsing to nearly negative 650,000 BTC in early June, with futures demand barely turning positive and spot buying still soft – a demand picture that undercuts any confident bottom call regardless of how derivatives markets are positioned. That data point sits uneasily next to Strive’s Joe Burnett, whose power law model, built by fitting a curve through every prior bear market low with a reported statistical fit of 0.9976, puts a 2026 floor near $61,000. Both views can be technically defensible at once. A rising structural floor and a collapsing demand engine are not mutually exclusive, they simply describe different time horizons, and the options market’s shrinking ceiling looks like traders hedging for exactly that ambiguity rather than resolving it.
The single most useful number to watch after July 29 is not Bitcoin’s price itself but whether the $70,000 strike keeps its position as the market’s most crowded call, or gets dethroned the way $80,000 was. A ceiling that keeps dropping after a Fed decision that traders currently expect to be favorable would be a far louder signal than any single trade’s outcome, bullish or otherwise.
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