Open interest is in contracts. Deribit BTC and ETH options settle 1 coin per contract, so leave contract size at 1. Edit any strike, or add rows for the expiry you are watching.
| Strike ($) | Call OI | Put OI |
|---|
Payout curve — total writer liability by settlement price
Each row is a candidate expiry price. The total is what all in-the-money calls and puts would pay out at that price, weighted by open interest. The lowest total is max pain — the most option value destroyed.
| Settlement price | Call payout | Put payout | Total liability |
|---|
How the magnet works
Most option open interest into a monthly expiry is written by market makers who then delta-hedge in spot and perps. When price rises toward strikes where they are short calls, they sell to stay hedged; when it falls toward strikes where they are short puts, they buy. That mechanical hedging leans against moves and tends to park spot near the strike carrying the most open interest — the max pain level — right up to settlement. The bigger the expiry relative to spot liquidity, the stronger the pull. It is a tendency, not a guarantee: a real trend or a liquidation cascade blows straight through it. Pair this with funding and gamma context rather than trading it blind.
The math, and why open interest — not price — decides the pin
Max pain is a minimization. For a candidate settlement price S, every call struck at K below S is worth S − K per contract, and every put struck above S is worth K − S. Multiply each by its open interest and add across all strikes: that sum is the total cash the writers of those options must deliver if the market closed at S. Sweep S across every listed strike and the price with the smallest total is max pain — the point where the fewest dollars of option value survive.
The counter-intuitive part is that max pain is driven almost entirely by where the open interest sits, not by the current price. A wall of puts stacked at 110,000 pulls the max pain price up toward 110,000 even if spot is at 118,000, because letting price fall would force writers to pay out that whole put wall. Two markets trading at the identical spot can have max pain 8% apart purely from a different open-interest distribution. That is why the number moves as the OI table fills in through the week, and why the last-day pin is usually tighter than a week-out estimate — new positions keep reshaping the curve until the options stop trading. Use it as a gravitational reference for the close, not a target you lean size into.