Options Max Pain

Options max-pain pins for BTC, ETH, and SOL, plus Futures Max Pain — the largest pending liquidation clusters above and below price.

What max pain is

For any option expiry, max pain is the price at which the total value of all outstanding options is lowest — the level where option buyers collectively lose the most and writers lose the least. Because dealer hedging flows tend to compress price toward heavily-sold strikes as expiry approaches, max pain is a widely watched “pin” candidate, especially into the Friday expiry window.

What Athena publishes

• Assets: BTC, ETH, and SOL, computed from Deribit options open interest (the deepest crypto options venue), with spot reference from Binance.
• Expiries: the front weekly, monthly, and quarterly max-pain strike per asset, shown against current spot. Fronts roll automatically after the Friday 08:00 UTC settlement. (SOL lists no monthlies on Deribit, so its monthly slot is empty by design.)
• Refresh: every 4 hours.

How to read it

• Distance matters. Spot pinned near max pain into a Friday is unremarkable; spot several percent away late in the week sets up the classic “gravity” debate — watch whether price drifts toward the pin as theta burns.
• Weekly drives, monthly/quarterly contextualize. The weekly expiry carries the most immediate hedging flow; the larger expiries mark bigger structural magnets that matter as their dates approach.
• Confluence beats any single level. The Telegram 🧲 Magnet Board scores exactly this — whether the options pin, the liquidation skew, the heaviest liquidation cluster, and the biggest order-book wall point the same way.

Futures Max Pain (liquidation clusters)

The futures companion card maps pending liquidation clusters: for each asset, the largest estimated pending-liquidation cluster sitting above and below the current price, with the dollar size of each cluster.

• Ranges: three build-up windows — positions accumulated over the trailing 12 hours, 24 hours, and 3 days. Longer windows accumulate more open risk, so their clusters are typically larger.
• Assets: the dashboard card shows BTC, ETH, and SOL; the underlying public feed covers the full dashboard universe.
• Refresh: every 4 hours.

How to read the clusters

• Asymmetry is the read. A much larger cluster on one side of price tells you where a move would meet the most forced liquidation flow — useful context for stop placement and for judging which direction a squeeze would feed on.
• Compare the windows. A level that shows up across the 12-hour, 24-hour, and 3-day windows marks a zone where positioning has been building persistently, not just an intraday blip.
• Pair it with the structure reads. The Liquidation Gravity section describes the same forced-liquidation landscape from a different angle; the two are complements, not confirmations.