The biggest change of the past few years isn’t demand, not ETFs, not macro. It’s market structure. The options layer has become so deep that it has rewritten the mechanics of price movement
Bitcoin used to run on pure reflexivity. Spot buying and perpetuals fueled momentum. Price went up, shorts got liquidated, market makers chased the move, and those vertical “God candles” appeared. The rally fed itself
Now there’s a massive shock absorber in the system options
When market makers sell calls, they hedge delta. Price rises they sell spot or futures. The higher the market goes, the more mechanical supply comes in. Upside gets capped not by opinion, but by algorithm
At the same time, large holders realized they don’t need to wait for the moon to extract value. Selling covered calls became standard. A structural overhang of calls formed at psychological strikes. As price approaches those levels, gamma hedging kicks in, sell flows appear, and a ceiling forms
#BTC shifted from a convex speculative asset into a yield instrument. The scaling of options on the iShares Bitcoin Trust made that fully visible
Looking at the progression of limits:
🛑 Late 2024 - approval, 25,000 contract limit
🛑 Mid 2025 - expansion to 250,000. 10x growth. Scalable covered call and vol-selling strategies become viable
🛑 Late 2025 - proposal to increase to 1,000,000 contracts. Near parity with major ETFs
🛑 Early 2026 - removal of special restrictions. Full integration into standard derivatives infrastructure
Each step expanded capacity for:
🛑 Call selling
🛑 Basis trades: long spot / short futures
🛑 Systematic volatility harvesting
🛑 Structured yield products
If you look at options volume distribution, it’s clear that after ETF derivatives launched, institutional flow began to dominate. The market stopped being one-dimensional. Price is no longer just belief. It’s gamma positioning, volatility supply, and hedge flows from large players
Momentum hasn’t disappeared. It’s been redistributed. Before, energy flowed into exponential growth. Now it flows into yield
#BTC has entered its institutional phase. Volatility management matters more than direction. By definition, that suppresses the explosive reflexivity that once made cycles vertical
And the past few weeks showed another side of financialization. When the market gets overloaded with options positioning, moves don’t accelerate - they break. Not moonshots, but cascading gamma unwinds
Crypto didn’t vanish. It became part of the system. And the system now smooths out what used to rip through charts
