Traders Load Up on $72K and $80K Bitcoin Calls
Deribit calls outnumbered puts 65.88% to 34.12% as traders concentrated on July $72,000 calls and December $80,000 $80,000 strikes; futures OI hit 755,780 BTC ($49.82B) on July 22.
Traders increased exposure to bitcoin call options, concentrating on near-term $72,000 strikes and longer-dated $80,000 bets. On Deribit, call open interest was 336,331.81 BTC versus 174,211.44 BTC in puts, a 65.88% to 34.12% split. Calls accounted for 56.35% of daily options volume on the platform.
The largest single positions on Deribit were concentrated in short-dated upside strikes. The July 31 $72,000 call held 26,265.5 BTC of open interest, the July 31 $70,000 call held 25,328.2 BTC, and a December 25 $80,000 call held 7,602.2 BTC.
Total bitcoin futures open interest across tracked venues reached 755,780 BTC, equal to $49.82 billion on July 22, according to Coinglass. Bitcoin traded near $65,971 at 11:45 a.m. EDT on Tuesday.
Binance held the largest share of futures open interest at 140,250 BTC, about $9.24 billion or 18.55% of the total. CME ranked second with 105,750 BTC, or $6.97 billion and a 13.98% share. CME’s futures open interest rose 1.80% over the most recent day even as total open interest across venues fell 4.26% in 24 hours and ticked up 0.11% in the last hour. MEXC, Gate, Bybit and OKX reported double-digit or high single-digit declines in open interest, while BingX gained 4.75% despite a smaller footprint of roughly $896.6 million.
Option-derived metrics showed different price points across exchanges. OKX’s near-term max pain sat around $66,000 and rose toward $69,500 for contracts expiring in late September. Deribit’s max pain climbed from roughly $65,000 to about $69,500 by September and held through December. Binance’s max pain rose to roughly $72,000 by late September before falling for later-dated expiries to about $61,500 by March 2026.
CME’s options book added an institutional layer to the positioning. CME bitcoin options open interest increased from near $10 million in June to roughly $50 million–$60 million recently, according to CryptoQuant. Puts generally exceeded calls in dollar terms over the past year, though the gap narrowed. Much of CME’s options exposure was concentrated in contracts expiring within one to three months.
Market strategists at Bitfinex noted measures of market activity that differed from the derivatives picture. Thirty-day bitcoin trading volumes ran at about 62% of the annual average, and one large strategy reported no trading for two straight weeks with holdings unchanged at 843,775 BTC. Long-term holder selling had largely faded. The put-to-call ratio stood near 0.56, a multi-month low. Bitfinex analysts wrote: “This is an absence of selling, not a resumption of buying.”
Last-week flows into spot ETFs showed spot Ethereum ETFs drew $105.4 million while spot bitcoin ETFs drew $75.7 million. Analysts cited the upcoming Federal Reserve decision as a near-term market catalyst.
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