Another Friday has arrived, with the spot market reaching a historic high this week, and another batch of cryptocurrency options contracts approaching expiration.

About 40,000 Bitcoin options contracts will expire on Friday, August 15, with a nominal value of approximately $4.8 billion.

This expiration event is slightly larger than last week's, but still not enough to impact the spot market, which reached a historic high in market capitalization this week.

Bitcoin Options Expiration

This week, the put/call ratio for Bitcoin options contracts is 0.90, which means the number of expiring long contracts is almost equal to the number of short contracts, making bulls and bears evenly matched.

Open interest (OI), which refers to the value or number of BTC options contracts that have not yet expired, peaked at $140,000, with OI soaring to nearly $3.2 billion on the Deribit platform at this strike price. Additionally, due to a large influx of contracts bought by bullish speculators, the number of open contracts at lower strike prices is decreasing, and at a strike price of $120,000, OI reached approximately $2.4 billion.

Additionally, according to CoinGlass data, the total open interest in Bitcoin futures is currently $83.3 billion, close to historical highs.

Cryptocurrency derivatives provider Greeks Live stated this week that the group primarily holds a bullish view, with 'BTC and ETH momentum strong, traders actively selling puts, and holding deep in-the-money long positions.'

The main emotions revolve around the ongoing bearish options selling strategy and excitement about ETH's outstanding performance, despite some concerns about high volatility levels.

The Greeks added that trading volume showed market enthusiasm, as Deribit traded $10.9 billion in options on Thursday, breaking the $10 billion mark for the first time in a single day.

In addition to today's batch of Bitcoin options, there are about 287,000 Ethereum options contracts set to expire, with a nominal value of $1.3 billion, and a put/call ratio of 1.0. This brings the total nominal value of cryptocurrency options expiring on Friday to approximately $6.1 billion.

Cryptocurrency Market Outlook

This week, the total market capitalization reached a historic high of $4.25 trillion, but is still less than that of the largest U.S. company, Nvidia, accounting for only 18% of the total market capitalization of gold, which is nearly $23 trillion.

However, by Friday, the market began to cool, and as of this writing, the total market capitalization has dropped by 4% to $4.1 trillion.

Bitcoin led the decline, falling 3.8% to below $118,000, but during Friday's early Asian trading, Bitcoin price slightly rebounded to $119,000.

Ethereum also pulled back from a near four-year high, dropping below $4,500 on Thursday, before recovering to $4,630 on Friday morning. Despite the growing calls for a 'altcoin season', altcoins are still being significantly sold off... the altcoin season has not yet arrived!

This week, a recognized pattern of Asian buying and American selling began to form.