Options Observatory
Deribit options analytics for BTC, ETH and SOL — open interest, value exchanged, expiries, volatility structure, and token-gated dealer-positioning layers.
What it is
The Options Observatory is a dedicated analytics page for the Deribit options complexes — BTC, ETH, and SOL (SOL trades in Deribit’s USDC-linear books). Every card has its own asset switch; time charts support preset windows and drag-to-zoom, and expiry views support forward windows (next 7 days / 30 days / 3 months). Data refreshes on Athena’s 4-hour capture cycle, and every card carries its own “Updated” stamp — the last time that card’s underlying source was refreshed (hover for the exact UTC time), because the book, the vol index, and the per-venue history come from different feeds with different cadences.
The charts
| Card | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Open interest by strike | Calls and puts mirrored around price with spot and the zero-gamma flip level marked — where the standing walls sit. |
| 24h premium by strike & by expiry | Where money actually traded today, by level and by date. |
| 7d premium by strike & by expiry | The same two views over the last seven completed UTC days, built from Athena’s own daily capture of every listed instrument — a week of premium separates a campaign at a level or a date from a one-off print. The cards say how many of the seven days have accrued while the capture is young, and note premium traded on expiries that settled inside the window. |
| Open interest by expiry & the expiry board | The settlement calendar: notional rolling off per expiry, tagged daily / weekly / monthly / quarterly, with per-expiry max pain, put/call ratios, and the implied move to each settlement (the straddle-priced expected range, with breakevens off spot). |
| Open interest change by strike & by expiry | Where positions are being opened (solid) or closed (outlined) against Athena’s daily capture, over one day and seven days. New listings count as builds; an expiry rolling off is not counted as an unwind. |
| Top instruments | The most-traded contracts by premium over 24 hours and over seven days, with their share of the window, implied vol and open interest. |
| Skew term structure & cross-asset IV | The 25Δ risk reversal and butterfly at every expiry (is the put wing rich at the front only, or along the curve?), plus 30-day at-the-money implied vol across BTC, ETH and SOL and the ETH/BTC vol ratio. |
| Volatility risk premium | 30-day implied minus 30-day realized, where realized is computed from Athena’s own spot anchors — framed as the risk gate Athena’s research found it to be, with a paired history. |
| Large prints & blocks | The biggest recent trades by notional with block trades flagged, from Athena’s collector — stamped with its own refresh time. |
| Futures basis curve | Annualized basis of Deribit’s dated futures by expiry and the perpetual’s premium and funding, with the CME front-month and Binance / Crypto.com perpetual basis alongside for cross-venue context. |
| Value exchanged | Daily options volume per venue (including CME) with 24h / 7-day / 30-day / 90-day totals, plus total open interest history. |
| Volatility structure | ATM implied-vol term structure, the volatility smile on a delta axis, and DVOL history. |
| Athena exclusive (token-gated) | The dealer-gamma (GEX) profile with its zero-gamma flip, Athena’s own 25Δ risk-reversal capture history, the IBIT-vs-Deribit skew spread, and customer net premium flow — what the taker side paid or collected in calls and in puts over 24 hours and seven days, by strike, from Athena’s trade capture — and the aggressor mix: the share of each side’s premium that the taker side bought over 24 hours and seven days, the put share of all premium, and the weekly risk reversal’s three-day velocity, each against its own trailing baseline. The aggressor mix is descriptive: a pre-registered out-of-sample test on the October 2025 to January 2026 tape found no forward lead, and the forward test reads in December. Layers built from Athena’s captures that have no free equivalent. |
| Next expiry & last roll | The Friday settlement in one card: notional settling (calls, puts, share of the book), spot against max pain, the straddle-implied range, and the strikes that dominate the expiry. After each Friday 08:00 UTC settlement the card adds the roll — how much settled, and per remaining expiry the open interest before and after, valued at one index so it reads as position change rather than price. The same numbers post to the Enclave as the Friday expiry brief and post-settlement roll. |
| Implied probability cone | Where the options market puts the odds: for each Friday expiry, the price range spot is priced to finish inside with 50%, 80% and 90% probability, fanning out from spot, plus a table of the chance of finishing above each round level by expiry. Read off the smile with a per-strike lognormal (no smile-slope term). These are risk-neutral odds — what the book charges, with the volatility premium and hedging demand baked in — not a forecast. |
Futures & institutional positioning
Below the options cards, three public cards give the futures-side context that desks read alongside the options book. All three are descriptive; none is a signal.
| Card | What it shows |
|---|---|
| CFTC positioning — CME futures | The regulator’s weekly Commitments of Traders census for CME Bitcoin and Ether futures (standard and micro contracts combined into coin-equivalents): asset managers, leveraged funds, dealers, other reportables and small traders, net, with week-on-week changes, a history back to 2018, and the per-contract breakdown. Positions are as of Tuesday and published Friday. Leveraged funds’ net short in BTC is mostly the short leg of the cash-and-carry basis trade against spot-ETF longs — read asset managers for directional institutional exposure, and changes rather than levels. |
| Spot ETF flows | Daily net creations minus redemptions across the US spot ETFs for BTC, ETH and SOL on each settled day, with 7-day and 30-day sums, how many of the last ten days were positive, net assets where the issuers publish them, and the latest day by fund. A trading day counts as settled only after the issuers' next-morning reports are in, so the latest day shown is complete rather than a partial evening print. |
| Carry board | What perp longs are paying against what the dated curve implies: open-interest-weighted perp funding (latest, 7-day and 30-day averages, annualized) beside the Deribit front-monthly and front-quarterly basis and the CME front-month basis, with the funding-minus-quarterly spread and a descriptive rich / cheap flag, plus a 30-day funding chart per asset. |
How to read it
Athena publishes this page as market structure, not directional alpha — and is unusually honest about folk signals: max pain is shown because desks watch it, while Athena’s own research found no reliable pinning effect at the index level. The measured replacement is the dealer-gamma profile: when dealers are net long gamma their hedging dampens moves, and below the flip level it amplifies them. Skew alerts derived from the risk-reversal capture post to Athena’s Enclave and are labeled descriptive while their forward test runs.
Options structure tells you where hedging flows can accelerate or absorb a move — it does not by itself say when the move comes.