everyone quotes the 81k call wall like it's a fixed feature of the book. i broke it out by expiry this morning and most of it is gone by monday.
btc calls at the 81,000 strike, open interest by expiry:
12 sep: 5,053
11 sep: 4,411
25 sep: 2,829
18 sep: 753
30 oct: 420
so about 9,500 contracts out of roughly 13,600 expire friday and saturday. spot is 79,554 as i write this, a bit under 2% below the strike.
the biggest single piece is the 12 sep contract. ask is $717, so $1,000 buys you 1.3 of them. breakeven lands at 81,717 and below the strike it pays nothing whatsoever.
which makes the wall look like a short dated bet more than a structural level. if btc doesn't get there this week, two thirds of it stops existing over the weekend and whatever the level meant goes with it.
honestly i'm not sure what to take from that. one reading is that the wall is thin and clears easily once it's tested. the other is that dealers short those calls have to hedge harder as spot climbs toward them, and that hedging is what makes walls behave like walls at all. both look reasonable to me and the numbers don't pick.
how do you read it?
caveats: deribit only, open interest and not volume, morning snapshot.