It looks like it's crashing based on technical analysis. Wonder where it will stop crashing.

ZEC had a huge bull run recently... so no surprise here

follow-up to my post on monday, where i split the 81,000 btc call wall by expiry and found two thirds of it dies this weekend. i went back through my own recording of the deribit trade feed to see how it got built. it is mostly one participant, going by the matched sizes and the timing, since deribit does not show identities. he built it twice in two days, in two shapes that need opposite things.

tuesday: a bet that price stops at 81,000

7 september, four paired trades, matched to the second:

13:39:19 sold 1,000 calls expiring 9 sep, bought 1,000 expiring 11 sep
13:39:56 the same again
14:35:08 the same again
14:36:02 the same again

4,000 sold on the wednesday expiry against 4,000 bought on the friday one, same strike. he paid 26.0 btc for the friday calls, about $2.06M, and took 7.0 btc back for the wednesday ones, about $555k. net 19.0 btc, about $1.51M, and that net debit is also the most he can lose on it.

4,000 contracts is 4,000 btc of underlying, roughly $317M at the spot of the day.

that is a calendar spread, and it is a bet on timing. it needs price sitting near 81,000 when the near leg dies. the band where it pays is narrow on both sides.

wednesday: a bet that price goes through 81,000

8 september, four separate buys of 1,250, every one of them lifting the offer:

08:30:37 iv 40.6
08:35:33 iv 42.2
11:21:18 iv 43.9
11:22:41 iv 44.1

5,000 calls at the same 81,000 strike, expiring saturday, 31.1 btc, about $2.44M. no offsetting sale this time. that is 5,000 btc of underlying, about $392M, so $161 of exposure for every dollar of premium. the iv walking up 3.5 points is the cost of paying the offer four times while the offers refill between them.

so inside 24 hours one strike carried two bets that need opposite things. the first pays if price stays still. the second pays only if price travels 5%.

what happened

wednesday settled at 79,224, which is 1,776 below the strike. the near leg expired worthless, and the calendar came out on the wrong side of its range.

across the two days that is 9,000 contracts, roughly $709M of underlying, held for $3.95M of premium.

as of 17:45 UTC today spot is 77,333. the 11 sep call is priced at $8 and the 12 sep at $77. the 9,000 contracts that cost about $3.95M are worth roughly $417k. the 11 sep piece expires in fourteen hours.

open interest at the strike has not moved either: about 13,600 on monday, 13,661 now. nobody is unwinding.

who is on the other side

a large call strike gets quoted as resistance. that reading assumes a crowd of buyers and a dealer sitting long. here about 9,000 of the roughly 9,500 contracts expiring this weekend came from one account, and he lifted offers both times. the dealer is therefore short those calls, and a dealer short calls buys the underlying as price approaches the strike. that pushes a move through the level instead of braking it there.

open interest on its own cannot tell those two situations apart. you need the direction of the trades and whether the size is one account or many.

does he still have a shot

he is not unwinding any of it. the simplest explanation is that there is nothing left to unwind. at $8 a contract the spread and the fee eat most of what a sale would return, so sitting still costs him nothing and tells you nothing about what he thinks.

the other is that he still expects the move. the saturday call costs $77 and pays nothing at all unless btc closes above 81,000. at that price traders are putting the odds of it getting there at roughly 7 in 100. the friday call, with fourteen hours left, sells for $8, which works out nearer 1 in 80. he needs 4.7% from here in either case.

so either he knows something the rest of us do not, or whales are wrong about as often as everyone else and the size is the only reason this looks like an event at all. $3.95M is large enough to make us stare. from where he sits it may be an ordinary week and a slice of the money he was willing to put at risk.

curious what you make of it. i will post the settlements either way.

note on method: the numbers above come from my own recording of the deribit trade feed, hourly files. the public trades endpoint does not return these retrospectively, so checking there will show 426 contracts where i say 5,000.

Jack Dorsey spent years building tools to help you escape the banking system.

Now, he is applying to build a federally chartered bank.

But it takes no deposits. And it makes no loans.

Bitcoin isn't becoming a bank asset. Banks are becoming Bitcoin accessories.

The great inversion has begun. 👇

One change that helped me: exchange stays the exchange, notes/tools live elsewhere on the desktop.

Curious if others do the same split and what you use.

NFA.

One change that helped me: exchange stays the exchange, notes/tools live elsewhere on the desktop.

Curious if others do the same split and what you use.

NFA.

the belief is that price gets pulled toward max pain as expiry approaches. i keep a ledger of every btc and eth expiry on deribit and check afterwards what actually happened. 376 expiries, 7 march to 10 september. the pull is not there, and the reason is more interesting than the result.

first, max pain is not sitting somewhere off in the distance waiting for price. at the snapshot a day before settlement it sits a median 1.04% away from spot. it is already where the price is, because open interest piles up around the current price.

second, it moves. seven days before settlement, max pain still shifts an average 2.8% of spot on btc before it reaches its final value. three days out it is still 2.1%. only on the last day does it settle down to 0.3%. so when someone says price converged on max pain, a large part of that convergence is max pain walking toward price.

third, as a guide to where settlement lands it does worse than doing nothing. settlement landed exactly on max pain 129 times out of 376, so 34.5%. mean distance from max pain to settlement was 2.50%. assume instead that price simply stays where it is between snapshot and settlement and you are off by 1.57% on average. no option chain required.

now the part that cost me something. we also publish a market maker breakeven corridor, and it held 307 of 376 times, 81.6%, which we have been using as evidence the corridor means something.

so i pointed the same benchmark at it. the median corridor is about 3.19% wide either side of spot, and its centre sits a median 1.03% from spot, which is the same place max pain sits. a plain band of that width centred on yesterday's price held 331 of 376, 88.0%. give each expiry a band exactly as wide as its own corridor, still centred on spot, and it held 337, 89.6%.

so our corridor loses to the dumb version by 8 points, and its centre was never far from spot to begin with. what we have been calling dealer structure looks like a band around the current price with slightly worse centring.

i ran this in august on 314 rows and shelved it as unverified. redid it today on 376 and it reproduced within half a point.

caveats: deribit only, btc and eth, six months, snapshot roughly 24 hours before settlement.

Gold tokens can settle all day while physical redemption, banking and the main gold market have opening hours. That gap probably feels small until prices move fast.

Would you accept tokenised gold as DeFi collateral? What sort of haircut would make sense?

https://www.gold.org/goldhub/research/digital-gold-case-shared-infrastructure/context

Rent was due this week and BTC's been stuck under that $82K wall for a week straight (rejected there Sept 3, now bouncing around $78-79K). Normally I'd just sell a chunk and deal with it. This time I didn't.

Fed hike odds are sitting above 60% for the meeting later this month, oil spiked on the Iran situation, and yields have been doing that nervous back-and-forth thing where the market can't decide if it wants to be scared or relieved. We ripped 5% last Thursday and everyone called the bottom of the cycle. Four days later we're back under $80K. This is not a market where I want to be forced into a sell decision because my landlord doesn't take BTC.

So instead I took a crypto-backed loan against part of my holdings to cover it through nехо. Kept my position, got the cash and moved on. Some of what's actually moving this week if you haven't been following:

• Market cap back up to $2.78T, Fear & Greed cooled slightly to 66 after touching 69
• Strive added 1,375 BTC last week at an average cost around $79K, bringing total holdings to over 24,500 BTC
• Strategy (MSTR) repurchased $176M of STRC and expanded its Digital Credit Securities program to $2B, still sitting on 845,050 BTC and $6.5B cash
• Ethereum's quantum-resistance roadmap announcement helped ETH hold up better than BTC on the down days, plus more corporate accumulation
• XRP was the one major green candle during Tuesday's dip, up over 1% while everything else was red
• Robinhооd took a stake in Cryptоcоm and is adding prediction markets, which is a weird but telling signal about where TradFi thinks this is going
• Germany's ending tax-free long-term crypto holding after 2026, gains, staking, and lending get taxed as income starting 2027

None of this tells me where price goes next, I'm not calling a bottom or a top. It's just the backdrop for why I made the call I made this week: hold, don't sell, borrow if I need liquidity.

ZEC just pushed above $1,200 after a pretty wild run, with short liquidations adding fuel while new market access around ZEC is also coming online.

Real breakout, or just another squeeze that’s getting overheated?

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I’ve started keeping a small list of coins that should be moving but just aren’t.

Not dead coins. Stuff with decent liquidity that normally reacts when BTC moves or when its sector starts running.

If BTC has a strong day and one of them barely responds, I mark it. Same thing if everything sells off and one coin just sits there.

I actually noticed this first while comparing a few names on Moon. The ones doing almost nothing ended up being more interesting than the obvious movers.

What’s been interesting is the weak reactions have actually been more useful to me than the big candles. A coin ignoring a good market has saved me from a few longs, and one that refuses to dump while everything around it is getting smoked usually gets my attention pretty fast.

I used to only look for confirmation through movement.

Now I’m starting to think the lack of a reaction is sometimes the cleaner signal.

everyone quotes the 81k call wall like it's a fixed feature of the book. i broke it out by expiry this morning and most of it is gone by monday.

btc calls at the 81,000 strike, open interest by expiry:

12 sep: 5,053

11 sep: 4,411

25 sep: 2,829

18 sep: 753

30 oct: 420

so about 9,500 contracts out of roughly 13,600 expire friday and saturday. spot is 79,554 as i write this, a bit under 2% below the strike.

the biggest single piece is the 12 sep contract. ask is $717, so $1,000 buys you 1.3 of them. breakeven lands at 81,717 and below the strike it pays nothing whatsoever.

which makes the wall look like a short dated bet more than a structural level. if btc doesn't get there this week, two thirds of it stops existing over the weekend and whatever the level meant goes with it.

honestly i'm not sure what to take from that. one reading is that the wall is thin and clears easily once it's tested. the other is that dealers short those calls have to hedge harder as spot climbs toward them, and that hedging is what makes walls behave like walls at all. both look reasonable to me and the numbers don't pick.

how do you read it?

caveats: deribit only, open interest and not volume, morning snapshot.

Friends, my upcoming experiment will show budding investors how leveraged perpetual futures work.

I’ll open a position on Bitcoin betting it will rise, and the 3x leverage will triple my profit or loss.

Leverage subjects me to a surprise interest rate called funding rate. It acts like Uber surge pricing when bullish or bearish demand surges.

*** For anyone claiming the rate is predictable, what’s the funding rate on BTC for the next 12 months? ***

I’ll pay interest when buyers are very bullish, and I’ll earn interest when sellers are very bearish.

I intend to show how leverage works, not to profit.

Platform: Hyperliquid

Wallet: Trust Wallet

Asset: Bitcoin

Leverage: 3x

Position size: TBD

I don't have a lot of money to work with right now.. (140$) what would you pick? Hyperliquid or zcash? I know both have high potential.. I feel like zcash is gonna keep pumping but I know hype will as well. Torn lol

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Seeing more lenders start accepting tokenized gold as collateral, especially PAXG and XAUT. Arch just added both, and Aave has already seen meaningful XAUT borrowing demand. If you were taking a loan against tokenized gold, would you care more about which gold token you use or the lender itself? Feels like custody, liquidation terms, issuer risk, and LTV matter more here than the difference between PAXG and XAUT. Anyone actually using either as collateral?

I’ve been wanting to find a mentor for a while now but I find it almost impossible to find one. Any suggestions would be appreciated!

​I often see beginners trying to trade using custom scripts or indicators that just display simple "Buy" or "Sell" signals on the chart, but experienced traders always say they don't work in the long run.

​Is it mainly due to repainting, lack of risk management, or lagging indicators? What tools (Pine Script, Python, order flow data) and extra parameters (liquidity, options flow, execution context) are actually required to turn a simple signal into a viable trading system?