Gate Research Institute: Market Consolidation Continues, Positions Concentrated on Year-End Volatility

Options Market Dynamics

Latest data show BTC IV at 45% and ETH IV at 68%, both continuing to decline week over week and hovering around their one-year average levels, reflecting a softening of market expectations for future volatility.

From a skew perspective, BTC 25-delta skew shifted lower evenly across tenors and converged around –5 vol, suggesting that near-dated put options continue to trade at a premium to calls, and downside hedging demand remains in place. ETH skew also moved lower more uniformly across the term structure, with even longer-dated maturities beginning to show a mild downside premium.

Both implied and realized volatility for BTC and ETH declined in tandem, while the volatility risk premium (VRP) oscillated narrowly around the zero line, indicating that current option pricing is broadly aligned with realized volatility and that the market’s pricing of near-term volatility has turned more neutral.

Block Trade Structure

In the BTC and ETH options markets this week, block trades were dominated by bullish diagonal calendar call spreads. The largest block trades were as follows:

• BTC: Buy BTC-270326-110000-C, total volume of approximately 1,000 BTC, with a net premium outlay of about USD 2.47 million.
• ETH: Buy ETH-020126-3300-C and sell ETH-191225-3250-C, total volume of approximately 4,819 ETH, with a net premium outlay of about USD 200,000.

Platform Update

Gate has exclusively launched a streamlined options trading tool—the Rolling Option Selling product—designed to help users automatically and continuously sell options over a predefined period. Users can customize execution by Delta or strike, select expiries (T+1 / T+2 / T+3), define selling price methods, position size, and optional take-profit and stop-loss parameters. The strategy automatically opens positions daily at 09:00 (UTC) and seamlessly rolls into the next cycle upon expiry, enabling fully automated operation. The feature also provides clear displays of risk metrics, margin estimates, and projected execution paths to help users manage strategy execution more intuitively.

Rolling Option Selling product guide: https://www.gate.com/help/other/options/48493