As Greeks.Live reported, a crypto whale has traded nearly 92,600 Ethereum call option contracts worth $150 million on Deribit. On Deribit, each option contract represents 1 ETH.
“The whale actively bought $150 million worth of ETH option contracts, and all of them were naked options with clear long-term bullish expectations”, Greeks.Live tweeted on X.
Call options allow the contract owner to buy a specific asset in the future at a predetermined price. Naked options are taken speculatively and highly risky because traders have no protection against adverse movement in the underlying asset’s price. So, spending hundreds of millions of dollars to buy ETH options shows this whale’s optimism about the bullish potential of ETH. This move took place while the crypto market is worried about FTX’s plan to sell their crypto holdings.
Previously on Sept 14, a judge in the US Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware has ruled that FTX – the exchange went bankrupt in Nov 2022 – can sell its crypto holdings to pay back creditors. FTX is obliged to notify the US Department of Justice 10 days before selling the assets but doesn’t need to issue a notice to the public.
The exchange is holding $3.4 billion in cryptocurrencies with high liquidity like Solana (SOL), Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), Aptos (APT), Tether (USDT ), XRP, etc. Besides, FTX is reportedly holding $900 million in type B tokens, which are tokens with low liquidity such as Serum (SRM), Blur (BLUR), Polkastarter (POLS), Maps.me (MAPS), Oxygen (OXY), Bonfida (FIDA), and more.