Expiry time: 08:00 UTC
Start with how Bitcoin options work if calls, puts, strike and premium are new to you.
Bitcoin and Ether options on Bybit, Binance and Deribit expire at 08:00 UTC on their expiry date. That is 17:00 in Tokyo; in London and New York the local time shifts with daylight saving. Trading in the expiring series stops at expiry; the box above shows the next weekly and monthly expiries the site records, and the options hub lists the full calendar with open interest per date.
Daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly cycles
- Daily: a new expiry every day at 08:00 UTC. Open interest is usually small.
- Weekly: every Friday at 08:00 UTC.
- Monthly: the last Friday of the month. Monthlies usually carry more open interest than weeklies.
- Quarterly: the last Friday of March, June, September and December. Headlines such as “$14 billion of options expire” usually mean these; the figure is the notional value of open contracts, not money that changes hands.
Cash settlement against a settlement price
These options settle to an account balance rather than requiring a purchase or sale of spot bitcoin. The currency and settlement process depend on the product. Each venue uses its own settlement (delivery) price, an average of its index rather than the last trade:
- Bybit describes its options as European style and cash settled, with the final settlement price taken as the average index price over the 30 minutes before expiry (Bybit options introduction). Past values are published through the delivery-price API.
- Binance's contract specifications describe European options settled in USDT, with the settlement price the arithmetic mean of its spot price index over the 30 minutes before expiry; for an 08:00 UTC expiry that is 07:30 to 08:00 UTC (Binance options contract specifications).
- Deribit uses a time-weighted average of its index from 07:30 to 08:00 UTC (Deribit settlement). Its delivery-prices API lists past values. Deribit is not among the venues this site records.
Averaging over half an hour makes a single trade at 08:00 UTC unable to set the price. Rules change; see each venue's delivery-price rules before relying on a detail here.
What happens to in-the-money options
Bybit and Deribit state that options in the money against the settlement price are exercised automatically; the holder does nothing. The payout depends on the product's settlement currency and contract size; fees can apply. Options out of the money expire worthless and the seller keeps the premium. For Binance's exercise details see its contract specifications.
For Deribit inverse BTC and ETH options, the positive difference between delivery price and strike (calls), or strike and delivery price (puts), is divided by the delivery price and multiplied by the option size in BTC or ETH. One $100,000-strike BTC call at a $125,000 delivery price pays 0.2 BTC before fees: (125,000 − 100,000) / 125,000. Since 1 August 2026, an in-the-money option first settles into an inverse future at its strike; that future then settles into the underlying currency. This two-step process preserves the net payout (Deribit inverse-options specifications).
Why open interest drops after expiry
Open interest counts contracts still open. At 08:00 UTC every contract in the expiring series is settled and closed, so its open interest leaves the total at once. On the options hub the whole-chain open interest steps down after a large monthly or quarterly expiry and then rebuilds as traders open positions in later dates. A drop on an expiry morning is the calendar, not a sign that traders fled.
Pinning and max pain: a hypothesis, not a rule
“Pinning” is the idea that price gravitates towards a strike with large open interest near expiry, for example because option sellers hedge their exposure. Max pain is the strike at which the open options would pay holders the least in total, and some traders expect price to drift there. Neither is a rule. Open interest does not show who bought or sold, how they are hedged, or their positions elsewhere, and spot often settles far from max pain.
The options max-pain track record compares recorded max pain at 24 hours and 1 hour before expiry with a price approximation at expiry. That price is the Binance perpetual bar open at 08:00 UTC, with an options-forward fallback; it is not the venue's settlement average. Distances describe the recorded sample, not causation or a strategy's returns.
Reading the live box
The box shows, for BTC and ETH, the next weekly and monthly expiry that has open interest, with the open-interest notional and that expiry's max pain across the venues the site records. A quarterly takes the monthly slot when it is the month's last Friday. It reads only the options hub's existing cache: when the cache is cold or more than 20 minutes old, a slot shows Unavailable and links to the options hub. Missing does not mean zero. See the crypto economic calendar for expiries alongside FOMC, CPI and jobs-report dates.
Checked against the exchanges' own documentation on 22 October 2026: Bybit: introduction to options · Bybit API: delivery price · Binance: options contract specifications · Deribit: settlement · Deribit: inverse options · Deribit API: delivery prices. Not financial advice.