Guide
Bitcoin options expiry: what happens at 08:00 UTC
Bitcoin options on Deribit, OKX and Bybit expire at 08:00 UTC. Most days that is a small daily expiry. On the last Friday of each month it is a large one, and at the end of each quarter it is the largest of all. This guide explains how an expiry works, what is at stake on 30 October 2026, and what our data shows about the half hour before settlement.
The expiry calendar
- Daily: every day at 08:00 UTC. Same-day options are called 0DTE.
- Weekly: every Friday at 08:00 UTC.
- Monthly: the last Friday of the month. These carry much more open interest than the weeklies.
- Quarterly: the last Friday of March, June, September and December, usually the largest of the year.
The three venues use the same time, so a large expiry settles everywhere at once.
How the settlement price is set
BTC options are cash-settled: nobody delivers bitcoin. At expiry every in-the-money option pays the difference between its strike and the settlement price, and every out-of-the-money option expires worthless. On Deribit, which holds most of the open interest, the settlement price is the average of its BTC index over the 30 minutes from 07:30 to 08:00 UTC. The index itself is built from several major spot exchanges. OKX and Bybit settle on an average of their own BTC index before 08:00 UTC; the exact window is in each venue's contract specifications.
Averaging over half an hour and across exchanges makes the settlement hard to push around with a single trade, which is also why the popular stories about expiry being "steered" deserve skepticism.
What changes when an expiry settles
At 08:00 the expiring contracts disappear from open interest. Their gamma disappears with them, so the estimated dealer positioning, the call wall and put wall and the gamma flip can all shift in one step. Any futures hedges that dealers held against those options are no longer needed. The dealer hedging guide explains that mechanism; our own tests found it hard to see in futures data.
The 30 October 2026 expiry
Snapshot on 19 October 2026, 08:05 UTC, from Deribit, OKX and Bybit:
- Open interest expiring: about 162,400 BTC, roughly 13.4 billion dollars at the time, or 37.7 % of all open BTC options.
- Calls and puts: 104,200 BTC in calls and 58,200 BTC in puts, a put/call ratio of 0.56.
- Max pain: 79,000, with BTC around 82,500.
- Expected move: options priced a move of about ±5.9 % (around 4,900 USD) by expiry, from at-the-money implied volatility. That is what options cost, not a forecast.
The numbers change every day as positions open and close. The expiry page for 30 October updates every hour and shows the settlement price afterwards.
What our data shows around 08:00 UTC
We measured the Binance BTCUSDT perpetual minute by minute on every day from January 2024 to October 2026 and compared the half hour before settlement with the half hour before that, and with the hour after.
| Day type (2024-01 to 2026-10) | Days | Range 07:00-07:30 | Range 07:30-08:00 | Range 08:00-09:00 | Volume around 08:00 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Quarterly expiry | 11 | 0.43 % | 0.52 % | 0.56 % | 1.69× |
| Monthly expiry | 22 | 0.38 % | 0.47 % | 0.55 % | 1.44× |
| Other Fridays (weekly expiry) | 113 | 0.38 % | 0.39 % | 0.57 % | 1.20× |
| Other weekdays | 584 | 0.37 % | 0.34 % | 0.54 % | 1.08× |
| Weekends | 292 | 0.21 % | 0.21 % | 0.34 % | 1.17× |
- The settlement window is busier on big expiries. On monthly and quarterly expiry days the range from 07:30 to 08:00 was about a quarter wider than from 07:00 to 07:30, and volume around 08:00 was 1.4 to 1.7 times the half hour before. On ordinary weekdays the same half hour was, if anything, slightly quieter.
- After 08:00 it looks like any other day. The hour from 08:00 to 09:00 had about the same range on expiry days as on other weekdays.
- No direction. None of these numbers says whether price rose or fell, and we found no reliable pull toward max pain.
- Small samples. 22 monthly and 11 quarterly expiries. Read the differences as tendencies, not rules.
What an expiry is good for. It is a scheduled event: you know the time, the size and the strikes in advance. It tells you when the options picture will reset, not where price will go.
Follow the next expiry live.Swiftedge Options shows open interest by strike, max pain, the call and put walls and the move options price for each expiry, from Deribit, OKX and Bybit. Free, no sign-up.
Open Swiftedge OptionsCommon questions
What time do Bitcoin options expire?
08:00 UTC on Deribit, OKX and Bybit. That is 09:00 in Central Europe in winter (10:00 in summer) and 04:00 in New York while US daylight saving time applies (03:00 otherwise).
Does Bitcoin move to max pain before expiry?
There is no rule that it should. Max pain is arithmetic on open interest, and in our pinning test the pull toward the big same-day strikes was a few hundredths of a percent, too small to matter.
Is the monthly expiry more volatile?
In our data the half hour before the 08:00 UTC settlement had about a quarter more range on monthly and quarterly expiry days than the half hour before it, and more volume. The hour after 08:00 looked like any other weekday. The samples are small (22 monthly and 11 quarterly expiries), and none of it says which way price moves.
Where can I see the open interest for the next expiry?
On the expiry pages, which appear three weeks before each monthly and quarterly expiry, and in Swiftedge Options by selecting that expiry in the top bar.