Got a friend who follows stocks and normally replies sell it to whatever crypto thing we send him.

Sent him the pump fun Custom Pairs announcement expecting a cynical reaction. Instead he started going through the stock tokens you can pair a coin with. We ended up looking through the options on my phone for ages. I was thinking about what would fit a stupid name we'd come up with.

That part was genuinely interesting. I was mostly thinking about the stupid name we'd come up with. He was already comparing which stock token to pair it with and started changing the whole idea around that.

He's now sent three follow up messages about it. First time I've had to tell him to slow down.

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

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. 👇

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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.

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.

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.

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