How much the hedge of every open bitcoin option on Deribit moves per 1 % in price — calls and puts apart, by expiry and by strike, every hour. Which side dealers hold is printed as an assumption, next to what the trade tape actually shows.
$557.4M per 1 % move · calls $327.0M · puts $230.4M · Deribit · own snapshot taken Oct-23 2026 20:03 UTC · largest at $80,000 ($60.1M), measured and published by askthetape.com.
Every open option has someone on the other side, and the desks that make those markets usually hedge by trading bitcoin itself. Gamma measures how much that hedge has to change when the price moves. This page adds it up for every open bitcoin option on Deribit, from our own hourly photographs of the whole board, in dollars of hedge per 1 % move — calls and puts kept apart, because which side the dealers hold is something the exchange does not publish. The headline is the total; the views split it by expiry and by hour, the table splits it by strike, and the last view shows what the trade tape records: who took liquidity, month by month.
| 🩸 which side the dealers hold — an assumption, printed both ways | the exchange does not publish who holds which side. Two conventions, the same numbers, opposite signs: if dealers hold the calls long and the puts short (the convention public gamma charts usually use), their net is calls minus puts, +$96.6M per 1 % move; if they hold the reverse, it is −$96.6M. Neither is measured here, and no chart on this page is signed by a dealer. |
|---|---|
| the side, from the tape | measured from the tape, assuming the maker is a dealer. Deribit's trade tape records the side of the TAKER (the field `direction`); summed over the life of every open instrument and weighted by its gamma, as of the tape's last trade Oct-23 19:24 UTC: in screen trades near-the-money puts show no side (z +0.80); calls show no side (z +1.23); with block trades (59 % of the volume) in, the side can't be told from a coin flip (z +1.35). In block trades «taker» is a role the parties or the broker assign, not always the side that started the trade. The z counts each UTC day as one unit: the sign of a whole day's net, across all open instruments at once, is flipped at random, and a z smaller than 2 in size is within what those random flips give; treating every instrument and day as independent would overstate the evidence (for the screen puts it gives z +1.07 instead of z +0.80). The monthly view is the other half of the tape: the share of contracts the taker bought. By calendar year puts were bought more than sold in 2024, 2025, 2026 and sold more than bought in 2017, 2019, 2020, 2021 — a regime, not a law. |
| 🩸 the three ways of counting the net | calls minus puts on the whole board: (a) Γ at each expiry's own forward, scaled by it +$96.6M · (b) scaled by the index price +$94.6M · (e) Γ at the index price +$84.9M — 12.4 % apart. All three read the same board; the print rule: more than 25 % apart, or a sign that differs, and the page prints the band instead of a number. |
| the arithmetic, checked against the exchange | Γ is Black-76 on the instrument's own mark_iv, r = 0, its expiry's own forward and the time to 08:00 UTC of the expiry day; dollar gamma = Γ × open interest × forward² × 0.01. A one-time check against Deribit's own ticker greeks (Sep-24 2026 19:45 UTC, 888 instruments with open interest): our gamma rounds to Deribit's five-decimal gamma on 886 of 888, and the sums of the legs agree within 1.0 % for calls and 2.1 % for puts. |
| 🩸 the moment of the snapshot | every gamma number in the headline, the expiry views and the strike table is ONE snapshot of the board — Deribit · own snapshot taken Oct-23 2026 20:03 UTC — not a day's average. Options settle at 08:00 UTC: 6.6 % of the gamma sits in 24OCT26, which settles at 08:00 UTC on Oct-24 and leaves the board then; the share of the gamma expiring within 24 hours has ranged from 1.8 % to 45.3 % over the 824 hourly snapshots since Sep-19 2026, so the headline steps down at every settlement. |
| only Deribit | Deribit's bitcoin options only: CME, OKX, Bybit and Binance options are not in these numbers. |
| units: dollars per 1 % move | every gamma here is in US dollars of delta change per 1 % move in bitcoin. Deribit's bitcoin options are inverse (they settle in bitcoin); the dollar convention is the one Deribit's own ticker gamma uses. Open interest is in contracts of 1 BTC. |
| 🩸 the balance level is a property of the board | the balance level is the price at which the calls' gamma equals the puts' gamma on THIS board, with every forward moved by the same share and each strike's implied volatility and time left frozen (sticky strike). It needs no assumption about dealers. On this board, below $78,867 put gamma outweighs call gamma. Over the 824 hourly snapshots since Sep-19 2026 it sat between 19.5 % below the index price and 0.2 % above the index price. |
| not a forecast | this describes positioning; it is not a forecast. |
| leg | `data/own/deribit_board/BTC/<day>.jsonl.gz` — our own hourly snapshot of the whole Deribit bitcoin board through the keyless public endpoint `get_book_summary_by_currency`, the same carrier as the options board page; computed by `opt_gex_extract.py` on every build, zero extra requests to Deribit. The taker side: Deribit's own public trade history (keyless), pulled once for Nov-2016 to Jul-28 2026 and frozen (md5 14bf5469), then our own hourly capture of the tape. |
| cadence | hourly: 824 snapshots since Sep-19 2026, 3 gaps longer than 65 minutes; the hourly view draws the last 14 days. |
| since | Sep-19 2026 for the gamma — the first day of our own board capture, so there is no 12-month range for it until mid-2027; Jan 2017 for the taker flow, whose range over the last 12 closed months is 48.0 % to 55.2 % for puts. |
| the strike table | the strike view is a table of the latest snapshot, band 0.85× to 1.15× the index price ($69,007 to $93,362), 34 strikes carrying 86.7 % of the gamma on the board. |
| this build | data to Sep-24 2027 |
| policy | no backfill of the gamma before our capture began · no daily export: the axes here are expiries, hours and months, not days · read it here · our own capture, and ours to give — but this page is a photograph of an option board with an hour-by-hour history and a monthly tape, not a daily series: there is no day-by-day file to hand over |
| strike | open calls / puts (BTC) | call gamma | put gamma | calls minus puts |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| $70,000 | 6,597.9 / 8,832.8 | $4.9M | $7.0M | −$2.1M |
| $71,000 | 939.6 / 3,069.5 | $0.6M | $2.3M | −$1.7M |
| $72,000 | 2,014.4 / 4,954.2 | $2.3M | $5.0M | −$2.7M |
| $73,000 | 584.7 / 2,634.6 | $0.6M | $2.9M | −$2.3M |
| $74,000 | 842.9 / 2,815.8 | $1.2M | $3.9M | −$2.7M |
| $75,000 | 3,436.6 / 9,339.9 | $6.1M | $17.6M | −$11.5M |
| $76,000 | 1,642.2 / 4,681.5 | $2.9M | $9.8M | −$6.8M |
| $77,000 | 283.7 / 2,553.2 | $0.9M | $7.7M | −$6.8M |
| $78,000 | 2,995.3 / 5,660.8 | $6.8M | $16.9M | −$10.2M |
| $78,500 | 0.0 / 200.7 | $0.0M | $0.7M | −$0.7M |
| $79,000 | 384.7 / 1,861.5 | $1.9M | $9.2M | −$7.3M |
| $79,500 | 0.0 / 214.0 | $0.0M | $1.6M | −$1.6M |
| $80,000 | 12,386.0 / 7,761.2 | $32.1M | $28.0M | +$4.1M |
| $80,500 | 3.0 / 413.0 | $0.1M | $9.1M | −$9.0M |
| $81,000 | 1,610.9 / 2,975.7 | $14.3M | $33.2M | −$18.9M |
| $81,500 | 170.3 / 305.7 | $5.0M | $10.5M | −$5.4M |
| $82,000 | 6,510.6 / 3,384.1 | $36.0M | $15.3M | +$20.6M |
| $82,500 | 345.3 / 30.9 | $3.5M | $0.3M | +$3.2M |
| $83,000 | 2,618.1 / 1,211.5 | $15.6M | $7.3M | +$8.2M |
| $83,500 | 174.2 / 120.5 | $0.6M | $0.2M | +$0.4M |
| $84,000 | 6,055.6 / 2,960.5 | $19.5M | $8.4M | +$11.1M |
| $84,500 | 202.5 / 32.1 | $0.3M | $0.0M | +$0.3M |
| $85,000 | 9,541.5 / 2,036.0 | $28.6M | $6.5M | +$22.1M |
| $85,500 | 108.5 / 0.0 | $0.1M | $0.0M | +$0.1M |
| $86,000 | 6,514.2 / 987.3 | $15.0M | $2.8M | +$12.2M |
| $86,500 | 15.9 / 0.0 | $0.0M | $0.0M | $0.0M |
| $87,000 | 2,549.1 / 469.5 | $5.9M | $1.1M | +$4.7M |
| $87,500 | 1.0 / 0.0 | $0.0M | $0.0M | $0.0M |
| $88,000 | 10,216.0 / 1,236.1 | $20.2M | $2.1M | +$18.1M |
| $89,000 | 2,598.2 / 71.2 | $4.3M | $0.1M | +$4.1M |
| $90,000 | 24,053.6 / 842.1 | $34.4M | $1.4M | +$33.0M |
| $91,000 | 2,603.4 / 3.7 | $2.6M | $0.0M | +$2.5M |
| $92,000 | 4,886.6 / 48.1 | $5.1M | $0.1M | +$5.0M |
| $93,000 | 1,808.8 / 52.2 | $1.4M | $0.1M | +$1.3M |
The chart itself is drawn in the browser: turn JavaScript on to hover a day, pick a window and draw your line. The numbers above come from the last build, Oct-23 2026 21:02Z.
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