Gamma exposure is not an equities idea that someone bolted onto crypto. It is a consequence of anyone running an options book and hedging it, and Bitcoin has one of those. Deribit carries the overwhelming majority of crypto options open interest, publishes the full chain, and does it on a public API.
The mechanic is identical
A dealer who is short options is short gamma: as spot rises their delta shortens, so they buy, which pushes spot further. A dealer who is long options does the reverse and leans against the move. That is the same loop that makes long gamma versus short gamma the most useful regime read on SPY, and nothing about it is equity-specific.
What changes is the arithmetic. A Deribit BTC option is one coin per contract, not 100. Apply the equity multiplier out of habit and every dollar-gamma figure comes out a hundred times too large.
Where the levels come from
The same three you would read on an equity map. The call wall is the strike at or above spot carrying the largest positive net gamma - resistance, and a pin. The put wall is its mirror below. The gamma flip is the spot level at which net dealer gamma changes sign, and it has to be solved for by re-evaluating the book at hypothetical spot levels, not read off the strike ladder.
That last distinction matters more in crypto than in equities. Crypto books are call-heavy, so walking cumulative gamma across the ladder puts the "flip" far below spot where deep out-of-the-money puts dominate. Solve it properly and you still often get a distant number - which is a real answer, not an error. A flip 18% away is not a level anyone will trade off.
What is genuinely different
Three things. Crypto expires every single day at 08:00 UTC, so pinning behaviour repeats daily rather than monthly. There is no close, so hedging is continuous rather than compressed into a session. And BTC and ETH trade as both coin-margined and USDC-settled books, which behave differently: the coin-margined one is collateralised in the same asset it is exposed to, and that reflexivity is what turns a drawdown into a cascade.
The NoVo Crypto Market Map computes this on the six cryptos that have a real options book, alongside funding and liquidation flow on everything else Robinhood trades.