Everyone will count the fund outflowsthe asymmetry is that insurance against a move got cheaper at the same time.
Case #20260917 · 17.09.2026 05:00 UTC · BTC$76,491 / ETH$2,441 · analysis: Opus 5 by Anthropic
📅YESTERDAY
Wednesday's 16.09 expiry settled at 08:00 UTC. BTC settled 2.3% from max pain — no match, but the market-maker break-even corridor held. ETH settled 5.1% from max pain, and there the corridor did not hold: price closed 0.9% below it.
It is the first corridor break after seven days running. Over the day the code closed two small whale cases, both in profit, and took in six new ones.
⚡THE GIST
• The whales went back into short in both assets at once: over the day the top Hyperliquid whales added $45M of short in BTC and $36M in ETH while trimming longs — the BTC short-to-long tilt grew to 3.3 times from 2.6.
• In BTC both sources of measurement pointed to the downside again — the perps and Deribit options — for the first time since 12.09.
• The funds sold for a second day running: another $296M left the BTC funds and $224M the ETH funds, and the ETH funds' week turned negative.
• Insurance got cheaper again after yesterday's spike: BTC vol on the nearest weekly expiry fell to the 9th percentile, even though puts are still dearer than calls.
• Verdict — continuation ⟳: the whales' short, which was melting yesterday, sped up again over the day, and three of the five camps of witnesses side with it.
• 📊 Our Polygon — Pendulum: standing position, $0 on the day, +$9,642 in total since 11.05.
• 📊 Our Polygon — signals: best — Dust Strategy V2 +$88,469 at a 5% win rate · worst — Wheel Trail V8 −$8,787. Table at the bottom.
🐋WHALES: WHAT CHANGED — three arenas
Arena one — Hyperliquid futures. After yesterday's trimming the whales are building the short again, and faster than at any point this week. In BTC the short side grew by a tenth over the day and the long side shrank by a seventh. The weekly window shows a shift toward short, and the last day's shift is bigger than the whole week's (how we track whale positions). ETH moved the same way: the short added $36M, the long shrank, and the tilt grew to 2.4 times from 2.1. Overleveraged whales: 59 against 60 yesterday, but longs now make up 58% of them against two thirds — leverage is leaving the long side. No forced closures among the top whales.
Arena two — Deribit options. Two separate whale positions, and once again they point in different directions. The first — quiet accumulation in small lots outside the blocks. In ETH all three of the week's biggest footprints are calls, above the market. In BTC two are calls and one is a put — below the market, almost all of it in Friday's expiry. The second — block trades (what a block is). There are fewer blocks than yesterday, but in BTC all three of the day's new cases are built on puts, while in ETH the biggest case is a far-dated call spread to March, bought for almost a third of a million. Separately, a position on BTC moving away from the current price in either direction showed up again and again.
Arena three — money at the exchange border. The border almost froze over the day. In 24 hours one notable tranche crossed it — BTC worth $2.8M, brought in from an exchange deposit address. The "bridge" channel is USDC cash: over seven days four times more came in than went out. The "Unit" channel is coins: over the week $33.5M of BTC went out against $19.4M brought in. Where the withdrawals go: about a fifth of everything withdrawn went to exchange addresses — less than yesterday. Border snapshot 17.09, 05:00 UTC.
This is positioning, not a direction forecast.
🧭CROSS-CHECK — five camps of witnesses
Witnesses are independent data sources that back up or contradict the whales' positions.
What the funds are doing. Spot ETFs are the only camp that measures purchases of the coin itself, not a leveraged position. On Wednesday 16.09 $296M left the spot BTC funds — a second day of selling after $450M on Tuesday; the sellers were led by BlackRock's IBIT, ARKB and Fidelity's FBTC. The week to 16.09 comes out at −$882M because of it, against +$840M the week before. Out of the ETH funds went $224M on Wednesday, and the ETH funds' week turned negative: −$58M against +$130M the week before. This confirms the whales: the institutions are selling both coins for a second day exactly when the perp whales go back into short.
What the options market says. This camp measures one thing: what insurance costs on Deribit. BTCskew+2.1 against +2.3 yesterday — puts are still markedly dearer than calls, and the market keeps paying extra for downside protection (what skew is). Insurance itself got cheaper: BTC vol on the nearest weekly expiry sits in the 9th percentile of its own hourly history since February against the 38th yesterday — cheaper than in 91% of hours (what implied vol is). Our fear-and-greed index stands at 82 out of 100 against 83 yesterday. This confirms the whales: the protection tilt faces the same way as the whales' short — even though the market won't pay for the move itself.
What the futures say. This camp measures who pays whom to hold a position. ETH funding on Hyperliquid is +0.010% in eight-hour terms against −0.006% yesterday — longs pay shorts again (what funding is). In BTC the longs' payment eased slightly. This contradicts the whales: demand for leveraged ether longs came back within one day, while the whales add to their short.
What the crowd is doing. This camp measures how retail accounts stand against the whales. On Bybit perps 61% of BTC accounts stand long and 70% of ETH accounts — almost as yesterday. The gap between the crowd and the whales in BTC widened to 37.4 points from 33.9 — the widest in a month, and over three days it moved enough to count as an event. This confirms the whales: retail is standing still, the whales are walking away from it into short, and the distance between them is a monthly record.
Any signs of stress. This camp measures whether anyone has already been forced out of the market. Among the top Hyperliquid whales, not one forced closure over the day. On OKX swaps $411k was liquidated, almost all of it longs — 3% of the week's volume. This camp is silent: the whales add to their short with no cascade at all; the market is simply standing still.
Again: this is positioning, not a direction forecast.
🌡ALTSEASON — the classic and our barometer
The classic altseason index stands at 29.7 out of 100 — bitcoin-season territory, a third day at the week's low.
Our barometer watches money, not prices: open interest, funding and retail come from Bybit perps, the whales from the Hyperliquid registry. Alts' share of open interest is 41.7% — $4.41B of $10.56B, within the week's range.
Alt contracts with funding hotter than bitcoin's make up 47% of open interest — the middle of the week's range.
Retail in the top-10 coins stands 67.6% long, the least of the week; the hottest are XRP and DOGE.
Whales in alts are structurally short: 34.5% long across $1.16B of positions, the biggest of them HYPE. That gap itself is permanent; the signal is in its CHANGE — and over the day it didn't move.
Full barometer: indiciadesk.com/en/altseason
⚖️VERDICT OF THE DAY
continuation ⟳ — yesterday the whales' short was melting; today it sped up again in both assets, and in BTC both sources of measurement pointed to the downside again for the first time since 12.09. Witnesses: the funds, the protection tilt and the crowd back the whales, funding contradicts them, stress is silent.
What this does NOT mean. It isn't a claim that BTC or ETH will go down. The whales' tilt is the widest of the week, yet insurance on the move is cheap again: the large players are positioned short, while the market as a whole won't even pay for the move itself — and those two pictures haven't met yet.
🔒In today's full RADAR:
— the day's biggest new case: a far-dated ether call spread to March, bought for almost a third of a million against the backdrop of whale shorts — legs and payoff profile;
— a 40× short sitting right at its liquidation line survived one more day — size, margin and how much buffer is left.
ANALYST access → indiciadesk.com/en/agent
💎DEEP
🔒WHALES IN DETAIL 💠
Portraits from the Hyperliquid registry, snapshot 03:16 UTC. Nicknames aren't treated as identification.
The market's biggest loss.ETH SHORT $248.5M, leverage 5×, entry $2,296, uPnL −$14.0M against −$11.6M yesterday, liquidation at $3,587 — 47% above spot. The size shrank by $7M over the day. The same address in BTC. SHORT $159.3M, leverage 5×, entry $72,682, uPnL −$7.8M, liquidation at $133,365 (+74%) — up $6M over the day, a second day of adding. A second address with the same pattern — the day's biggest build.BTC SHORT $103.5M against $77.4M yesterday — up $26M over the day, with the average entry raised from $69,800 to $71,291. ETH SHORT $170.2M with no material change. uPnL −$7.0M and −$9.1M, liquidations at $133,884 and $3,529, account $81.5M against $71.3M — $10M of margin was added under the new short. A short right at the edge — it survived the day.BTC SHORT $44.0M at 40× leverage, entry $75,853, uPnL −$329k, liquidation at $77,026 — only 0.7% above spot, account $1.2M. Yesterday it stood 2% from the line with a size of $49.2M; over the day the position was trimmed a little, while the buffer shrank threefold. No public label. A 10× short growing for a third day.BTC SHORT $62.3M, entry $76,661, uPnL +$192k, liquidation at $89,476 (+17%), account $12.5M — up $14M over the day. Self-labelled. Yesterday's 40× long is gone. The BTC LONG of $45.6M at 40× with liquidation 6% under spot no longer shows in the top six: the day's low of $75,018 never reached its line, so the position was closed by its owner or cut below $22.9M. Two new high-leverage BTC longs. LONG $25.3M at 40× from $76,081, liquidation at $61,509, account $6.3M — self-labelled; LONG $22.9M at 20× from $75,871, liquidation at $71,781 (−6%), account $1.7M — no label. The ether longs are holding.ETH LONG $73.7M at 20× from $2,134, uPnL +$9.1M; ETH LONG $48.7M at 4× from $1,936, uPnL +$10.0M — once again the market's biggest gain; ETH LONG $36.8M at 25×, opened yesterday at the low, already +$770k. A 15× ether short — built up over the day.ETH SHORT $33.3M, entry $2,410, liquidation at $4,289, account $30.6M — the position grew by more than two thousand ETH over the day and entered the top six.
Cases in the registry — six new over the day (#1085–#1090), all from Deribit options; three of them below with payoff profiles, the rest in one line, plus two earlier cases for comparison. Case #1085 · ETH bull call spread to March: 1,645 calls at $2,800 bought, 1,645 calls at $4,000 sold, expiry Friday 26.03.2027 — 3,290 contracts, entered at $2,432, first day. Net premium about 129.0ETH paid (≈$314k): the whale pays for exposure to an ether rally between $2,800 and $4,000 over the next six months — on the same day the perp whales are building their short.
Case #1088 · BTC put diagonal across two autumn expiries: 25 puts at $79,000 sold for Friday 02.10.2026, 25 puts at $84,000 bought for Friday 30.10.2026 — 50 contracts, entered at $76,384, first day. Net premium about 1.59BTC paid (≈$121k). Both legs are in the money — in effect this is a position on BTC staying lower through the end of October.
Case #1090 · BTC put diagonal: 25 puts at $78,000 sold for Friday 18.09.2026, 25 puts at $80,000 bought for Friday 25.09.2026 — 50 contracts, entered at $76,384, first day. Net premium about 0.72BTC paid (≈$55k). The sold leg settles tomorrow, Friday, and is already $1,500 in the money.
Профіль виплат на експірацію 2026-09-18. Кит заплатив $55k премії. Беззбитковості в показаному діапазоні немає.
Case #1080 · BTC risk reversal: 100 calls at $70,000 sold and 100 puts at $70,000 bought, expiry Friday 30.10.2026 — a synthetic short from $70,000, premium about 8.22BTC received (≈$624k), second day. Spot rose 1% over the day, and the sold calls became slightly dearer for the whale.
Профіль виплат на експірацію 2026-10-30. Кит отримав $624k премії. Беззбитковість: $76 236.
Case #1059 · BTC short strangle: 100 puts at $72,000 and 100 calls at $86,000 sold, expiry Friday 18.09.2026 — tenth day in play, premium about 0.70BTC received (≈$55k). It settles tomorrow at 08:00 UTC, and spot sits 6% above the lower edge — inside the range, where both sold legs expire without a payout.
Профіль виплат на експірацію 2026-09-18. Кит отримав $55k премії. Беззбитковість: $71 452 і $86 548.
Also new: #1089 BTC put diagonal ($77,000 puts sold for 18.09, $78,000 bought for 25.09, about 0.48BTC paid), #1086 ETH condor for 30.10 ($1,600/$2,100/$2,900/$3,400, about 3.9ETH received), #1087 ETH put diagonal (about 8.4ETH received). Closed by the code over the day: #1076 BTC call diagonal — about +$16k for the whale, and #1084 BTC put diagonal — about +$4k; both after the first leg settled. ΔOI over the week, both ways:BTC+3,255 calls at $80,000 and +2,275 at $82,000 (82% of it in 02.10 and 25.09) against +2,523 puts at $74,000 (68% in tomorrow's expiry). ETH calls only: +52,588 at $2,600 (77% in today's expiry), +20,604 at $2,700 and +13,974 at $2,800.
🔬Who exactly
Both of the biggest shorts are Abraxas Capital Mgmt (Heka Funds). Over the day the firm grew its BTC short across both addresses by $32M together and added $13M of margin, while trimming the ETH short a little — for a second day running the firm is shifting weight from ether to bitcoin. The firm's unrealised loss is $37.9M against $32.0M yesterday — price rose over the day.
The 10× BTC short is self-labelled VBVIT; the new 40× BTC long is self-labelled MoonpathCliff. Nicknames aren't treated as identification.
The $33.3M ether short that entered the top six over the day sits on an address labelled Wintermute, a market maker. For a market maker a perp short is often a hedge against options or spot, so we don't treat it as a directional position.
The 40× short at the liquidation line, the second big ETH long, the new 25× ETH long and the 20× BTC long are addresses without a public label.
Fasanara Capital dropped out of the ETH top six: its short is now smaller than $33.3M or closed.
Money by address. The day's only tranche above the threshold — $2.8M of BTC brought in from a Binance deposit address. Over the week the coin channel sent $29.3M of BTC out to player addresses, Wintermute among them.
🔒THE WEEK'S DYNAMICS 🔬
Perps.BTC: net $351M short (long $151M against short $502M), $45M toward short over 7 days, while the day alone brought $61M — more than the whole week: yesterday's shift toward long was more than covered. ETH: net $360M short (long $265M against $625M), $47M toward short over 7 days, $56M over the day.
Gamma flip.BTC$74,083 — up another 2,317 over the day after yesterday's jump, and spot now sits only 3% above it; +2,898 over the week (what the flip is). ETH$2,372 — spot 3% above it.
The price of fear. On the weekly window the premium is deeply negative: IV36.1 against realised HV42.3 — minus 6.2 against minus 3.7 yesterday, 6.1 deeper over 7 days. Over the week the market travelled much further than options price in, and options got cheaper again over the day.
Changing of the guard. Over the week the whales assembled 211 confirmed structures: 51 bullish, 61 bearish, 19 on volatility, 80 on range. For the first time this week bearish outnumber bullish: yesterday it was 57 against 54 in favour of bullish.
🔒CROSS-CHECK IN DETAIL 💠
BTC levels. Everything below comes from Deribit options open interest. The market-maker break-even corridor is $75,500–$77,500 against $75,500–$78,000 yesterday — it narrowed from the top, with spot in the middle; by our study across 386 expiries price stays inside such a corridor in roughly 82% of cases (what the corridor is). Max pain $76,500 (what max pain is). Today's 17.09 expiry is light — 5,477 contracts.
Tomorrow, Friday 18.09.BTC: 22,213 contracts, max pain$77,500, put wall $74,000 on 3,126 — up from 1,695 over the day, now the expiry's main wall; call wall $79,000 on 1,830 (what the walls are).
Ether today, Thursday 17.09. 99,203 contracts, max pain$2,420 — spot 0.9% above it. Call wall $2,600 on 40,668 contracts — spot 6% below it, so if price doesn't move before settlement, all of those calls expire worthless. Put wall $2,400 on 3,306.
ETH for Friday 18.09. 136,134 contracts, max pain$2,500, put wall $2,200 on 8,335, call wall $2,800 on 23,430.
ETH levels. The corridor is $2,380–$2,480 against $2,380–$2,560 — narrowed from the top, max pain$2,420.
The quarterly, Friday 25.09.BTC: max pain$72,000, put and call densest at $70,000 (9,400 and 10,942). ETH: max pain$2,200, put $2,100 on 36,938, call $3,000 on 42,415.
Fuel. Above BTC$59.8M of short positions in the $77,848–80,138 band — twice the $30.1M of longs below the market in the $72,506–74,796 band. In ETH$34.9M of long fuel below the market in the $2,314–2,387 band, and no short fuel above it at all. This is about the RANGE of a move for the same push, not about a higher probability of that move (what the fuel map is).
Gamma vacuum. In BTC it's dense above spot; empty below, at $72,000–$73,000. In ETH dense above spot; empty below, at $2,300–$2,350.
Stress test ±2%. For BTC and ETH, a 2% move from spot either way leaves the dealers in positive gamma — the move gets damped.
OI flow.BTC put/call across all expiries: month 0.56 · week 0.54 · now 0.55 — stable; ETH0.51 · 0.54 · 0.50 — almost as yesterday (what put/call is).
Two options venues. On the same expiries up to 30 days BTC put/call is 0.54 on Deribit against 0.99 on Bybit — 0.90 yesterday; ETH0.53 against 0.82. We don't know who owns the Bybit positions, so this is neither "whales" nor "retail" — just a second venue with a different lean.
IV by tenor.BTC 2d P32/C33 · 8d P33/C31 · 43d P37/C34, percentiles since February 27th, 9th and 16th; yesterday the two-day stood at the 59th and the weekly at the 38th. ETH 2d P41/C44 · 8d P46/C46 · 43d P52/C52, percentiles 23rd, 19th and 35th. BTCDVOL35.5 against 30-day realised 34.0 — a premium of +1.5 against +4.3 yesterday; ETHDVOL 51.5, premium +0.8 (what the premium is).
💎SCENARIOS IN DETAIL 💠
The code's verdicts for yesterday. The scenarios from 15.09 are closed: "Slide into the long fuel" confirmed — the low of $75,225 on the spot index the code uses went through the $76,130 trigger; "The corridor holds" did not — only 38% of the time inside the band. The three scenarios from 16.09 run to tomorrow. The week since 10.09: 21 scenarios — 5 confirmed, 3 partially, 3 not, 7 cancelled at their cancellation levels, 3 still running. All-time: corridor 8 of 23 plus 6 partial, squeeze-up 7 of 27, slide into the long fuel 5 of 16 — the directional types do worse than a coin toss, the corridor type comes in under half.
The corridor holds — 40%. ⏱ 2 days, to Saturday 19.09. BTC stays between the fuel bands, $74,800–$77,850. Cancellation level: a touch of $72,500 — the bottom of the long-fuel band.
Squeeze up through the short fuel — 30%. ⏱ 2 days, to Saturday 19.09. Trigger: a touch of $77,850 — the bottom of the band of short positions, twice the size of the long band. Cancellation level: a touch of $74,800.
Slide into the long fuel — 30%. ⏱ 2 days, to Saturday 19.09. Trigger: a touch of $74,800 — the top of the band of long positions. Cancellation level: a touch of $77,850.
This is how we weigh the odds — not a promise; the code will compute the verdict from spot history.
🔭WHAT TO WATCH
• Today, Thursday 17.09, 08:00 UTC: settlement of the ETH expiry with 40,668 calls at $2,600 — spot sits 6% below them, and the week's biggest wall leaves the market (💠).
• Tomorrow, Friday 18.09, 08:00 UTC: settlement of short strangle #1059 and of the sold leg of #1090 — one is in the money, the other not yet (💠).
• The 40× BTC short 0.7% from liquidation: any bounce to $77,026 closes $44M by force, and the short fuel above the market is twice the long fuel below it (🔬).
🆓TAIL
📊POLYGON
(our own signals at real prices, not a backtest)
⚙️Pendulum · Wheel(standing position, real prices)
+$0 on the day · +$9,642 in total · since 11.05.2026
⭐ Top-5 signals($1,000 per signal; "total" is the sum of all trades, not the return on a single thousand):
signal trades win last total since
Dust Strategy V2 415%−$1,125+$88,469 21.03
Dust Strategy V1 349%−$1,125+$33,656 20.03
Volatility Convergence V3 2941%−$174+$13,199 26.05
Skew 2.0 V2 4038%+$341+$11,382 26.05
Fear Flash V2 2232%−$418+$3,023 16.05
Deepest in the red: Wheel Trail V8 −$8,787 · Wheel Trail V6 −$7,718 · Wheel Trail V7 −$6,179 — three variants of one signal that hunts a reversal and pays for every attempt while the trend runs. Two trades closed in the top five over the day: Skew 2.0 V2 came out $341 up, Volatility Convergence V3 $174 down — its second loss in a row, and its win rate slipped to 41%. The most profitable signal — Dust Strategy V2 — wins only 5% of its 41 trades. Win rate isn't money.
📅PUBLIC LEDGER
(computed by code at the settlement price)
The market-maker corridor. Across 386 expiries since February the market-maker break-even corridor held the settlement price 316 times — 82%. Yesterday's expiry held in BTC but not in ETH: after seven days running, ether's price closed 0.9% below the corridor. Decision: we lean on the corridor, knowing that roughly one expiry in five it doesn't hold — yesterday's ether was that fifth.
Max pain. An exact match with the settlement in 36% of those same 386 expiries. Yesterday both assets drifted away: BTC by 2.3%, ETH by 5.1% — the widest gaps of the week. Decision: we don't chase max pain; on a day of sharp movement it is least useful.
The walls. The call wall held the settlement in 50% of expiries, the put wall in 41%: roughly a coin toss. Decision: a wall without an expiry and a contract count isn't published, and with them it is only a place where dealer hedging slows a move, not where it stops.
Whale structures by type (our Deribit registry, 723 closed cases). Put diagonal — the type of four of the day's new cases: 70 closed, +$2.21M in total for the whales, the most profitable type in the registry. Short strangle — like case #1059, which settles tomorrow: 10 closed, 70% successful by strikes, yet −$498k in total. Bull call spread — like the biggest new case: 29 closed, 41%, +$419k in total. All closed cases together: −$5.9M. Decision: win rate isn't money, and we don't copy whale structures — we track where they stand.
Polygon. Pendulum +$9,642 since 11.05 with $0 on the day. The Dust Strategy: 75 trades across both versions and +$122k together, a fifth day without new trades. Volatility Convergence: a second loss in a row; Skew 2.0 closed in profit. Decision: we publish both tallies daily with the same denominator; we keep the Dust Strategy for the money it makes despite its win rate, and the Wheel Trail is the first thing we look at in every review.
📏Scale calibrator
• What protection costs. Our fear-and-greed index — 82 out of 100. We compute it from the price of volatility and the option skew on Deribit, not from news, which is why it diverges from the well-known index.
• Cheap or expensive for this market itself.BTC two-day vol — 27th percentile of the hourly history since February, weekly — 9th, the next six weeks — 16th: after yesterday's spike all three are cheaper again than in most hours.
• Which way protection tilts.BTCskew+2.1 — puts markedly dearer than calls, and the extra paid for downside protection is holding for a second day; ETHskew−0.5 — there is almost no tilt there. Terms: indiciadesk.com/en/glossary/
Not investment advice and not a recommendation to trade. Derivatives trading carries a high risk of loss; INDICIA DESK is a research publisher, not an adviser licensed by MAS, the SEC or the FCA — decisions and their consequences are yours.