Max pain is the strike at which the largest total value of options expires worthless. The theory is that hedging flows tend to drag spot toward it into expiry.
In equities the effect is real but modest, and it is concentrated around monthly expiries where the open interest is large enough for hedging to matter against the size of the underlying market.
What daily expiry does to it
Crypto options expire every day at 08:00 UTC, with the large expiries falling on Fridays and at month end. So there is a max-pain level every single day.
The consequence is not that pinning is stronger. It is that each day’s expiry carries a small fraction of the open interest, so the hedging flow associated with any one of them is correspondingly small. A daily max-pain level is a much weaker claim than a monthly one, and treating them as equivalent overstates most of them.
The size question
The honest test for whether an expiry can move spot is a comparison the number itself does not make: how large is the expiring open interest relative to what the spot market trades in the same window? On a large Friday expiry that ratio can be meaningful. On an ordinary Tuesday it usually is not.
This is why a max-pain level published without the expiring notional beside it is close to useless — the level says where, and only the size says whether to care.
Why the pull is weaker than the story
Max pain assumes dealers hedge toward the strike that hurts customers most, which is a convenient story rather than a mechanism. The actual mechanism is ordinary gamma hedging: near a large strike with dealers long gamma, hedging dampens moves and price tends to stay put. That is gravity, and it is a better-founded idea than max pain.
Where the two coincide, the level is worth watching. Where they disagree, the gamma structure is the one with a mechanism behind it — and in a call-heavy book they disagree more often than in an index book.