Crypto options expire at 08:00 UTC, and something expires most days. The frequency is the easy part; the distribution is what carries the information.
Four tiers, wildly different sizes
Daily contracts are short-dated and typically small — used for immediate positioning rather than structural exposure.
Weekly expiries land on Fridays and carry considerably more.
Monthly expiries, the last Friday of the month, carry more again.
Quarterly expiries are the largest of all, and they are where institutional positioning concentrates because they are the longest-dated liquid contracts available.
So an ordinary Tuesday expiry and a quarter-end expiry are separated by orders of magnitude in open interest, and any statement about “expiry effects” that does not say which tier is close to meaningless.
Why the tier decides the effect
Whether an expiry can influence spot depends on the expiring open interest relative to what the market trades in the same window — the ratio argument in crypto gamma is smaller than it looks. On a daily expiry that ratio is tiny. On a quarterly it can be genuinely large.
Which is also why a daily max-pain level deserves far less weight than the same calculation on a quarter end.
The roll
Large expiries produce a roll: positions closed in the expiring contract and reopened further out. That flow shows up as open interest falling in one expiry and rising in another, and it is not a change in overall positioning even though a single-expiry view makes it look like one.
Reading open interest on one expiry in isolation around a quarter end will show a collapse that is simply the position moving. It is the same trap as reading open interest without knowing whether contracts were opened or closed.