For the past 40 days, Ether (ETH) has been on a slight uptrend, following a narrow channel for most of the time. It saw a brief rally to $ 4,000 in the first week of September, but a subsequent decline sent the price on an upward channel.

In August, non-fungible tokens saw record-breaking transactions that clogged the Ethereum network and caused the average transaction fee to exceed $ 40 in early September. Although NFT transaction volume continues to decline, new items continue to be minted every minute, regardless of whether they are just manufactured to be traded or not.

On September 13, Cathie Wood – CEO of Ark Invest, a US $ 58 billion asset manager, commented. Ark Invest holds related positions in Coinbase (COIN) and Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC). Additionally, Wood has long been a proponent of Bitcoin.

Ether investors may have got lucky as one of the coin’s biggest competitors, Solana (SOL), faced a 7-hour blackout on September 14th. Trading Volume The surge in the breakout flooded the transaction processing queue and caused the network to crash.

Another incident happened the same day after the network rolled onto the second layer of Ethereum, Arbitrum One went offline for 45 minutes. The team attributed the downtime to a large number of transactions being sent to the arbitrum processor in a short period of time.

These events show the importance of the ETH 2.0 upgrade, which will bring parallelism and significantly reduce transaction fees. Strangely enough, Ethereum also faced a large invalid blockchain from a malicious company. However, the majority of network clients reject the attack, so it is unsuccessful.

As shown above, the bears were taken by surprise and 95% of the put (sell) instruments were placed at $ 3,500 or less. Therefore, if ETH stays above this price on September 17th, only $ 8 million in neutral to bearish put options will be activated on expiry.

A put is the right to sell Bitcoin at a set price on a set expiration date. Hence, a $ 3,000 call would be worthless if ETH stayed above that price at 8:00 a.m. UTC on September 17th.

The call-to-put ratio reflects the equilibrium situation

A call-to-put ratio of 0.95 represents the small difference between a call option (buy) of $ 173 million and a put option (sell) of $ 181 million. This bird’s eye view requires one more detailed analysis to consider that given the current $ 3,500 level, some bets are far fetched.

For example, if the expiry price of Ether was $ 3,300 on September 17, all call options above that price would be worthless. The right to buy ETH for $ 3,700 would have no value in this case.

Here are the four most likely scenarios considering the current price of Ether. The imbalance in favor of one of the parties represents a theoretical profit from the time of expiry. The following data shows how many contracts will be activated on Friday depending on the expiry price:

• From $ 3,100 to $ 3,300: 2,100 calls versus 20,300 bookings. Net income is $ 58 million in favor of protective (bear) put instruments.
• From $ 3,300 to $ 3,500: The net result is a bear-bull balance.
• From $ 3,500 to $ 3,700: 17,600 calls versus 2,300 bookings. The net result is $ 55 million in favor of a call (bull).
• Over $ 3,700: 17,600 calls versus 2,300 bookings. Net income supported call options of an additional $ 85 million.

This rough estimate assumes that calls are only used in bullish strategies and put options are used in neutral to bearish trades. However, investors may have used more complex strategies that often involve different expiration dates.

Expect low volatility this week

Buyers and sellers are faced with a small profit from the moving ether price to increase their profits on the weekly option expiration. Whether or not it hits $ 3,500 is going to be interesting – things could go either way.

To put things in perspective: The ETH monthly option, which expires on September 24, currently holds 1.6 billion US dollars in open interest. Therefore, both sides concentrate all their energies on the next week.

The views and opinions expressed here are solely those of author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Cointelegraph. Every investment and trading movement involves risks. You should do your own research when making a decision.