On Friday, Bitcoin (BTC-USD) options worth $6.68 billion and Ethereum (ETH-USD) options worth $3.5 billion will expire on leading crypto derivatives exchange Deribit, according to CoinDesk. This will make up over 40% of the current $23 billion in open interest, which could lead to a lot of market volatility as traders adjust their positions.
Luuk Strijers, CEO at Deribit, said that over 25% of these options, worth more than $2.7 billion, are likely to be profitable. This comes after Bitcoin dropped over 10% during the past month while Ethereum fell by more than 12%. These pullbacks could be attributed to crypto miner sales and news that the trustee for the defunct Mt. Gox crypto exchange will start returning over 140,000 BTC to clients in July.
Nevertheless, the call-put skews—the difference in demand between call and put options—tracked by Amberdata are suggesting that traders are betting on a positive turnaround for Bitcoin and Ethereum in early July, especially with the expected start of Ethereum ETF trading in July.
Is ETH Going to Boom?
When using TipRanks’ technical analysis tool, the indicators seem to point to a neutral outlook for Ethereum. Indeed, the summary section pictured below shows that 10 indicators are Bullish, compared to two Neutral and 10 Bearish indicators.
Still, Ethereum has greatly outperformed both the SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (SPY) and Bitcoin since 2019, according to data from TipRanks. In fact, $10,000 invested in Ethereum would be worth over $242K today compared to over $95K for Bitcoin and almost $24K for SPY, as per the image below. Although past performance isn’t indicative of future results, the fact that ETH is smaller than Bitcoin does provide it with the potential to continue outperforming.
