The 25th of June will be quite an important day for Ethereum as the cryptocurrency would be facing its largest options expiry. The open interest of around $1.5 billion will be settled- where the figure is around 30% larger than the expiry on the 26th of March. The earlier expiry took place due to the price of Ether plunging by around 17% in around 5 days- where it bottomed out at $1,550.
Yet, the price of Ethereum did rally up 56% after the expiry of March, where it reached a sum of $2,500 in around three weeks. Ironically, the movement of Ether is quite uncorrelated with the movement of Bitcoin. This makes it quite important to understand if the same market structure might be in play for the future on the 25th of June.
Recent History Shows A Mix Of Bullish And Bearish Catalysts For Ethereum
On the 11th of March, the miners of Ethereum decided to organize a protest against the EIP-1559 which would be quite harmful to their own revenues. The situation went on worsening on the 22nd of March when CoinMetrics decided to launch their Ether Gas Launch stating that the network upgrade might not have any bearing on the high gas problem.
Things did start changing on the 29th of March when Visa announced its plans of using the blockchain of Ether to settle their flat transactions. On the 15th of April, the Berlin Upgrade called for the average gas fee to plummet down to levels that were more manageable.
There is quite a disproportionate amount of call options set at $2,200 and multiple higher strikes. This implies that if the price of Ethereum on the 25th of June goes below this level, around 73% of the neutral to bullish options will be rendered pretty worthless. There have been call options numbering in the 95,000s which would still function if they were able to represent an open interest of $228 million.
