Bitcoin experienced a short-lived rebound following Deribit's options expiry on Friday, only to surrender the gains within two hours.
Approximately $2.24 billion in Bitcoin options expired on Deribit at 08:00 UTC, comprising $1.40 billion in calls and $844 million in puts. The exchange's delivery price was set at $77,234, calculated as a 30-minute time-weighted average of its Bitcoin index from 07:30 to 08:00 UTC.
In the hour before expiry, Bitcoin declined 0.16% to 0.18% across Deribit's perpetual, Coinbase spot, and Kraken spot markets. The asset then gained 0.19% to 0.21% by 09:00 UTC in the first hour after settlement. However, this rebound did not persist. From 08:00 to 10:00 UTC, Bitcoin ended slightly below its expiry-time level on all three venues, with losses ranging from 0.014% on the Deribit perpetual to 0.038% on Kraken spot.
Bitcoin traded as low as $76,000 during the European afternoon session before recovering toward $77,500.
The price action partially resembled a pattern documented in peer-reviewed research examining 1,059 Deribit expiry days from January 2021 through December 2023. That study found a statistically significant tendency for Bitcoin to decline in the hour before expiry and reverse during the following two hours under specific market conditions. Friday's price path did not complete the expected reversal pattern, and market-data dashboards tracking gamma conditions did not show the negative cumulative gamma proxy conditions described in the research near spot prices.
