Bitcoin max pain: what it is and how to read it before expiry
What max pain means in Bitcoin options, how to calculate it from Deribit open interest, when expiry happens and why price often never reaches the level.
Contents
Bitcoin max pain is the strike price at which the buyers of all calls and puts in one expiry would collectively receive the smallest payout at expiration, and option sellers would keep the most. For Bitcoin it is calculated from Deribit open interest, separately for each expiry date. It is a reference point, not a forecast: the settlement price often ends up far from max pain.
Below we explain where the level comes from, how to calculate it yourself, when it means something and why you should never rely on it alone.
What is max pain in options?
Every option has a strike and an expiry date. A call pays its buyer if the price at expiry is above the strike; a put pays if it is below. At expiry, an option is worth only its intrinsic value: the gap between the settlement price and the strike when that gap favors the buyer, and zero otherwise.
Add up the intrinsic value of every open option in one expiry at a range of hypothetical settlement prices and you get a curve of "how much option buyers would be paid". The low point of that curve is max pain. That is how Deribit defines it in its educational piece: the strike at which option sellers owe option buyers the least.
Hence the name: at that price, option holders feel the "maximum pain", because the largest share of purchased contracts expires worthless or close to it.
There is also a "max pain theory": the idea that the underlying price drifts toward this level before expiry because large option sellers benefit if it settles there. It is a hypothesis, not a law of the market, and below we show cases where it did not hold.
How max pain is calculated
The calculation is simple and needs no volatility model, only open interest by strike for a single expiry.
- Treat each strike of the expiry as a possible settlement price.
- For every call with a strike below that price, compute the payout: (price − strike) × open interest.
- For every put with a strike above that price, compute the payout: (strike − price) × open interest.
- Add them up to get the total payout at that price.
- Repeat for every strike. The strike with the lowest total is max pain.
A teaching example with made-up numbers (in dollars and contract counts for simplicity):
| Strike | Call open interest | Put open interest | Payout if settled at this strike |
|---|---|---|---|
| $90,000 | 100 | 400 | $4.0M (only the $100,000 and $110,000 puts) |
| $100,000 | 300 | 300 | $1.5M (the $90,000 calls and $110,000 puts) |
| $110,000 | 500 | 50 | $5.0M (only the $90,000 and $100,000 calls) |
The lowest payout is at $100,000, so that is max pain for this hypothetical expiry.
In the real market there are dozens of strikes, which makes manual work tedious. We do it automatically: the key-numbers strip on the BTC Radar home page shows max pain for the next large Deribit expiry, and the "All numbers" section adds its size in BTC and the put/call ratio. The level is recalculated every 15 minutes from Deribit open interest.
One important detail: max pain shifts as traders open and close positions. Deribit notes that it is most interesting in the last few days before expiry, when positioning is largely in place.
Bitcoin options expiry: when and how it happens
The main venue for Bitcoin options is Deribit. According to The Block, it held about 90% of all BTC options open interest in June 2025, which is why max pain is usually quoted from Deribit.
How expiry works on Deribit:
- Time. Options expire at 08:00 UTC. Besides daily expiries there are weeklies (Fridays), monthlies (last Friday of the month) and quarterlies (last Friday of March, June, September and December).
- Settlement price. It is not the price at exactly 08:00 but a 30-minute time-weighted average of the Deribit index, from 07:30 to 08:00 UTC. This reduces the risk of last-second manipulation.
- Cash settlement. No bitcoin changes hands; only profit or loss is transferred.
- Style. European: options can only be exercised at expiry.
Quarterly expiries draw the most attention because they carry the largest share of open interest. The 27 December 2024 expiry, for example, involved about $14.5 billion in Bitcoin options, roughly 44% of all BTC open interest on Deribit at the time.
How to read max pain before expiry
Max pain is useful not as a price target but as one brushstroke in the positioning picture. What to look at alongside it:
Expiry size. Max pain for a weekly expiry worth a few hundred million dollars says little. A quarterly expiry worth over ten billion is different: dealers there carry genuinely large hedges.
Distance from spot. If max pain sits $3,000 below the market a day before expiry, it is worth checking whether large open-interest clusters nearby could amplify a move. If it is $20,000 away, it almost certainly says nothing about the next few hours.
Put/call ratio. Below 1 means there are more calls than puts in open interest. It describes positioning but does not tell you who bought and who sold.
Large strikes. Strikes with the most open interest often matter more than the max pain point itself: dealers hedge delta around them, which means buying or selling the underlying.
What happens after 08:00 UTC. Hedges on expired options come off, and after a big expiry the market sometimes "unpins". That is an observation, not a rule.
Examples: max pain vs. the actual price
| Deribit expiry | Size | Max pain before expiry | BTC around 08:00 UTC |
|---|---|---|---|
| 27 Dec 2024 | ~$14.5B | $84,000–85,000 (Forklog) | ~$95,100 |
| 27 Jun 2025 | ~$15B | $102,000 (The Block) | ~$106,800 |
| 27 Mar 2026 | ~$14.2B | $75,000 (CoinDesk) | ~$68,500 |
Prices around 08:00 UTC for December 2024 and March 2026 come from Binance BTCUSDT 4-hour candles; for June 2025 from The Block. In all three of these large expiries, the price never reached max pain. In March 2026, with Bitcoin near $71,000 two days before expiry and max pain at $75,000, the price moved not up but down, to about $68,500 by Friday morning.
Limitations of max pain
It is not a forecast. Max pain is arithmetic on open interest, not a model of where price will go. Deribit says plainly that on its own it is a limited tool.
You don't know who the seller is. The calculation assumes every option was bought by "the crowd" and sold by "dealers". In reality retail traders and funds also sell options (for example, writing calls against coins they hold), and dealers can be net long. Open interest does not reveal which side a large player is on.
Options are only part of the market. Bitcoin's price is set mostly on spot exchanges and perpetual futures. News, macro data, ETF flows and leveraged liquidations can easily outweigh option hedging, even around a large expiry.
The level drifts. In the week before expiry, max pain can shift noticeably simply because traders opened new positions or closed old ones. A value from a month ago says almost nothing about where the level will be on expiry day.
Settlement uses a 30-minute average. Nudging the settlement price in the final seconds does not work; you would have to hold it for half an hour, which is expensive.
Stock-market pinning does not carry over automatically. An academic study by Ni, Pearson and Poteshman (Journal of Financial Economics, 2005) found that closing prices of US optionable stocks cluster at strike prices on expiration days. The authors attribute this to dealer hedge rebalancing and manipulation. That is a specific market with specific mechanics; it is not proof that max pain acts as a magnet for Bitcoin.
How to use it
- As context, not a signal. Read max pain together with expiry size, large strikes and put/call. Even when all three point the same way, that is a description of where positioning is heavy, not a trade recommendation.
- Mark the time. Large Deribit expiries land on the last Friday of the month and quarter at 08:00 UTC. Volatility spikes in either direction are possible around then.
- Compare with funding and liquidations. Perpetual futures positioning usually moves price more than options do. Funding on four exchanges and live liquidations are in the Market pulse section; see our funding explainer for how to read it.
- Don't treat it as a forecast. Our daily forecast uses many inputs; max pain is just one of them.
- Same approach for Ethereum. ETH max pain is calculated the same way from ether options. In December 2024, for example, max pain for the quarterly ETH expiry on Deribit was $3,000 (Forklog).
More Bitcoin data is on the coin page. This article is educational and is not investment advice.
FAQ
What is max pain in Bitcoin options?
It is the strike at which the total payout to buyers of all options in one expiry is the lowest. It is calculated from open interest on Deribit, the largest Bitcoin options venue.
What time do Bitcoin options expire?
On Deribit, options expire at 08:00 UTC. The settlement price is the average index price over the 30 minutes before that. The largest expiries fall on the last Friday of the month and quarter.
Does the price always move to max pain?
No. At the quarterly expiries of December 2024, June 2025 and March 2026, Bitcoin settled $4,000–11,000 away from max pain.
Where can I see the current max pain?
On the BTC Radar home page in the key-numbers strip, which shows max pain for the next large Deribit expiry; the "All numbers" section adds its size and put/call ratio.
