Gate Research Institute: Market downside risks have not yet been cleared, and funds are flowing into Ethereum options to pursue long volatility strategies

PANews January 29 News, according to Gate Research Institute observations, this Friday will see approximately $9.8 billion in BTC and ETH options settle simultaneously. Currently, the implied volatility (IV) for BTC and ETH are 38% and 54%, respectively, with ETH IV dropping to a very low level of 1.6% percentile over the past year. Over the past week, BTC and ETH Skew have remained negative, indicating a dominant demand for downside protection; short-term hedging sentiment has significantly increased, while long-term risk pricing remains stable.

In terms of block trades, in the past 24 hours, the options market for BTC and ETH has mainly seen bearish spread trades; the largest structure involved selling BTC-30JAN26-85000-P, with approximately 500 BTC traded, resulting in a net premium income of about $180,000. For ETH, a long volatility strategy buying ETH-6FEB26-3150-C, with around 2,000 ETH traded, resulted in a net premium expenditure of about $90,000.

Recently, Gate launched a convenient options trading tool — Portfolio Strategy Orders, to help users efficiently respond to different market conditions such as narrow-range fluctuations, slow gains, or slow declines. This feature supports various common multi-leg options strategies like spreads and straddles, allowing users to create multi-leg options in one go and visually display the overall cost, profit and loss structure, and risk exposure in a portfolio format. Users can quickly build and manage multi-leg strategies without having to operate each leg separately, significantly reducing operational complexity and improving trading efficiency.