The $1.2 billion options wall came down, and this time Bitcoin actually moved
For most of the month, traders had a pretty good explanation for Bitcoins refusal to budge. A dense cluster of options contracts, they argued, was holding the price in a cage between $60,000 and $65,000, with dealers buying dips and selling rallies to stay hedged. Fridays expiry cleared roughly $1.2 billion of that exposure, and the aftermath was supposed to settle the question. If the options were pinning Bitcoin near $63,000, price should start drifting once they vanished. And it did. Bitcoin was trading around $66,200 on Tuesday, up about 2.9% on the day and roughly 5% on the week, pressing against a $65,700 resistance-turned-support level it hasnt held all month. You could call this vindication: remove the wall of options suffocating price, and the market breathes. But the more accurate take is that the expiry was never doing the heavy lifting, and the fuel behind this weeks move actually came from somewhere else. The options wall came down, and the demand walked in About 19,000 Bitcoin options contracts settled on July 17 with a notional value near $1.2 billion, a put-call ratio of 0.9 and a maximum-pain level at $63,000. Ethereum added 123,000 contracts worth roughly $230 million, carrying a much heavier 1.61 put-call