Bitcoin dropped 6.13% to $47,855.17 on Wednesday morning, losing $3,250.19 from its previous close. Bitcoin, the world’s biggest and best-known cryptocurrency, is down 31% from the year’s high of $69,000 on November 10.
While the spot trading volume of bitcoin remained mostly unchanged from a day ago, its price turbulence came as the market headed into monthly options expiration.
A total of 129,800 option contracts worth more than $6 billion are set to expire on Friday, according to data provided by Skew.
These wild price swings usually comes from spot market manipulations by option sellers -mostly institutional traders – to push the spot price closer to the strike price at which the highest number of open options contracts expire worthlessly.
That creates maximum losses – so-called max pain – for option buyers. The max pain point for Friday’s option expiration is $48,000, according to Cayman Islands-based crypto financial services firm Blofin.
Bitcoin and Altcoins are expected to continue this down trend until after the holidays early next year, according to market observers.
Ether , the coin linked to the Ethereum blockchain network, dropped 5.57 % to $3,796.6 on Wednesday, losing $235.8 from its previous close.
Many altcoins are down more than 6%, including ICX, ZEC, AAVE, KSM, XTZ, RVN, LINK, TFUEL, IOTX, AUDIO, STX, AR and COMP. Meanwhile, MIOTA is up 15%, hitting $ 1.50 and taking its weekly surge to nearly 14%. BTT hit $ 0.0030 after gaining 12% in a day and week.