October 31: options expired within 0.1% of max pain, and bitcoin has held a 2.5% range since

01What changed since yesterday

Bitcoin is $77,364 at 10:15 UTC, 0.7% below the last note and flat on the day. Friday closed at $77,187, down 0.78%, the lowest close since September 17. At 18:50 UTC it touched $76,173, just under the hack-night low of $76,320 and the lowest price since September 17.

Scoring: issue 2’s 24-hour range resolved at 09:00 Friday at $77,849, below its $78.3k floor: a miss, though inside its 95% range. Issue 3’s 24-hour range resolved at 08:00 today at $77,203, inside $76.1k to $79.8k: a hit. Both open 7-day calls are inside, and Friday’s low stayed $1.1k above the nearer floor, issue 2’s $75.1k.

02The October expiry

About $11 to 12 billion of bitcoin options on Deribit, roughly a third of its open interest, expired at 08:00 UTC on Friday, October 30. Trackers put max pain, the price at which the most contracts expire worthless, at about $78k, with calls outnumbering puts about two to one. Deribit settles on its index’s 30-minute average; on Bitstamp, the same half hour averaged $78,061.

Price did move toward it. From the hack-night low it rose 3.05% to $78,644 by 06:30, and it traded between $77.9k and $78.5k through the settlement hour. After expiry it peaked at $78,085 at 08:15, then drifted 2.45% lower by evening. 305 of the 315 five-minute closes since expiry lie between $76.5k and $79k.

That fits the idea that hedging pins price near max pain into expiry, but it does not prove it: the same rise was also a rebound from the hack-night low. What the data does show is that the expiry did not release a move. The range since is a third of the day before’s, and the settlement area, $77.9k to $78.4k, is now the nearest hourly resistance.

03The Binance hack, two days on

Binance says the theft was about $6.3 billion and that it has set aside more than $6.34 billion of its own funds, $5 billion of it already held in the stolen tokens, buying the rest through markets and OTC desks. About $3 billion is frozen. It plans a phased restart of withdrawals this weekend and proof-of-reserves results on Monday, November 2. These are the exchange’s figures, as reported.

Leverage is back. Perpetual funding is 0.0097% per 8 hours, near the 0.01% default and up from 0.0037% at the last note, and open interest on the three venues the site tracks is up 2.7% to 200,368 BTC. Options traders are paying more for protection: DVOL rose from 37.3 before the hack to 42.0 on Thursday and reads 40.6 today, the middle of its one-year range.

A close back above $78.4k would retake the expiry price; a break of $76.2k would open September’s support at $75.6k.

04The levels either side

On 5-minute bars price sits between support at $77.2k, 0.2% below and tested again this morning, and a weak resistance at $77.5k, 0.1% above. Above, the hourly chart has resistance at $78.1k (the settlement area), then $78.8k and $79.4k, under the daily resistance zone from $79.7k to $82.6k. Below, hourly support at $76.3k ($76.0k to $76.5k) held on the hack-night low and again on Friday evening. Then the daily zone at $75.6k ($74.7k to $76.5k), and the long-term weekly support at $71.8k.

05What the cone allows, and the call

30-day realized volatility is 28.3%, still lower than on 92% of days in five years. The ensemble reads 41.3% for the month ahead, between EWMA at 31.4% and GARCH at 52.6%. That gives a 24-hour 80% range of $75.5k to $79.2k and a 7-day range of $72.2k to $82.9k.

This issue’s call: the forecast’s 80% range for November 7 is $72,156 to $82,902, and its 95% range is $69,387 to $86,211. The November 7 close scores it.

None of this is a trade signal. It describes where price sits and the range the models allow.