Bitcoin Surges Past $75K as Derivatives Unwind

Bitcoin surged past $75,000 early Tuesday, tagging a high of $75,800 and decisively clearing a resistance corridor that had turned back three separate rallies since 2024 — and the engine behind the move is coming from the derivatives market, not the spot crowd.

What Broke Bitcoin Past $75,000?

The resistance band between $73,750 and $74,400 had been the wall. Bitcoin bounced off it three times over the past two years — each time, bulls gave up and sellers stepped back in. On Tuesday, that changed. The breakout was clean, and the culprit wasn't a new wave of spot buyers loading up. It was derivative traders covering their short bets.

Specifically, this is about put options — contracts that give traders the right to sell BTC at a set price before expiration. Back in early February, when bitcoin nearly cratered to $60,000 on some exchanges, panicked traders aggressively bought puts at the $55,000 and $60,000 strike prices. That made sense at the time. The market was in freefall and those puts were insurance against further downside.

But then sentiment shifted. Bitcoin stabilized. Those deep out-of-the-money puts started looking increasingly worthless as expiration approached — and traders who held them began closing positions, selling those contracts back into the market.

In bitcoin, the recent move has been driven largely by sizeable put selling around the $55,000 and $60,000 strikes, as traders increasingly recognized that these options were unlikely to expire in the money with only days remaining. The unwinding of these downside hedges has contributed to the latest bullish price action.

Why Closing Bearish Bets Actually Pushes Prices Higher

Here's where it gets interesting — and where a lot of retail traders miss the mechanics. When a put option gets sold or closed, the market maker who originally sold it has to rebalance their own hedge book. They were short BTC to hedge the put they sold. Now that the put is gone, they need to buy BTC back. That buying pressure is real, systematic, and it snowballs as more puts get unwound at similar strikes.

This is what bitcoin put options data shows playing out in real time — the cascade of forced market maker purchases creating a self-reinforcing bid under the market. Each unwind triggers more buying, which pushes price up, which makes more puts look worthless, which triggers more unwinding. Classic gamma squeeze territory, though Thielen stops short of calling it that explicitly.

Call it what you want. The mechanics are the same.

What's missing from this rally — and this part matters if you're trying to figure out whether this move has legs — is aggressive upside call buying. There hasn't been a significant rush into bullish call options at higher strikes. That's Thielen's read, and it's worth taking seriously. A rally built purely on hedge unwinds is structurally different from one where bulls are piling into leveraged long positions.

The selling or closing of Bitcoin put options reduces downside hedging pressure and forces market makers to buy BTC to rebalance their exposure, creating supportive flows that can push prices higher.

How Does This Rally Affect the Broader Crypto Market?

Bitcoin doesn't move in isolation, and this breakout is no exception. The broader CoinDesk 20 Index — a basket of the top crypto assets — gained 5% to 2,202 points in the 24 hours leading up to the move. That's a meaningful broad-based lift, not just a BTC story.

Ether had one of its better days lately, jumping nearly 8% to $2,360. According to 10x Research, ETH's gains are partly being supported by increasing demand for bullish options bets on the asset — suggesting that for ETH at least, there's more active directional positioning happening compared to BTC's mostly passive unwind dynamic. XRP tacked on 8% while Solana gained 4%. Further down the risk curve, ZEC, PEPE, DOT, and VIRTUAL were among the standout performers, typically what you'd expect to see when BTC breaks out — altcoins chase with leverage.

The open question is whether this becomes a genuine trend reversal or just a short-squeeze that fades once the put unwinds are exhausted. CoinDesk had flagged the $75,000 level the previous week as a potential acceleration point, specifically citing anticipated market maker hedging activity as a catalyst — and that call looks prescient now. But acceleration from hedge-driven flows has a ceiling: eventually the puts are gone and the market needs real buyers to take it higher.