While $754 million flowed into US spot Bitcoin ETFs in the first week of August, the options market is seeing increased trading preparing for a short-term price decline, CoinDesk reported. In the last 24 hours, 53.8% of BTC options trades were put options (bearish bets), and most of the actively traded contracts were put options with strike prices of $62,000-$63,000. In contrast, 60.7% of the total open interest (OI) is still in call options (bullish bets), indicating that while long-term expectations for a rise are dominant, there's a growing move to hedge against short-term downside risk ahead of the US July employment report release. Luke Deans, a senior researcher at Bitwise, stated, "The market expects no major fluctuations for now, but given the low trading volume, even a slight increase in buying or selling could cause BTC prices to fluctuate more significantly than expected. Just because BTC isn't moving doesn't mean there's no risk."
