Retail Gamma Flip: BTC Gamma Without Deribit

You can now take Deribit out of the gamma picture in one click, and get a separate Telegram alert when price crosses the flip of the other four exchanges.

On GammaFlip, All sums the options books of five exchanges: Deribit, Bybit, OKX, Derive and Binance. For BTC that sum is mostly Deribit. On 28 October 2026 Deribit held about $32.5B of BTC options open interest; the other four together held about $7.0B. So Deribit is roughly 82% of the book, and the combined gamma flip sits close to Deribit's own flip.

That is fine when you want the market-wide picture. It hides something when you trade short timeframes: the positioning on the other venues often looks different, and its flip can sit right on top of price while the combined flip is well below it.

Two Books, Two Horizons

Deribit is where most funds, market makers and block trades live. Its book is big and spread out over the quarterly expiries. The other four exchanges carry more of their open interest in the next few days.

On 28 October 2026:

• Within 8 days: 53% of the open interest on Bybit, OKX, Derive and Binance, against 39% on Deribit (and Deribit's figure includes the 30 October monthly, about $11.1B on its own).
• Beyond 90 days: 12% on the four exchanges, 16% on Deribit.
• Gamma per dollar: the four exchanges hold about 18% of BTC open interest but about 24% of its absolute gamma. Short-dated options carry more gamma, so the same money moves the hedging picture more.

Short-dated gamma is what dealers re-hedge hour by hour. When it sits on the four exchanges, their flip responds to this week's price and this week's expiries, while Deribit's flip moves with a larger and slower book.

We call the set of four Retail: all exchanges except Deribit. The name is shorthand, not a claim about who each trader is; plenty of professional flow trades on OKX and Binance too. What separates the two sets in the data is the horizon of the open interest, not the label.

What It Looks Like on the Chart

Same BTC hourly chart, same four days (25–28 October 2026), three exchange choices. Watch the dashed magenta line: that is the gamma flip at each candle.

All exchanges. The flip ends at $79,645, about $1,100 below price ($80,745). Price spent most of the four days above it: a positive-gamma regime, where dealer hedging tends to damp moves.

Deribit only. The flip sits even lower, at $78,882, roughly $1,900 under price, and the candles never came near it.

All except Deribit. A different picture. The flip tracks price closely, and price crossed it several times on the 26th, 27th and 28th. At the last candle it sits at $80,923, above price: on these four exchanges BTC is already in the negative-gamma regime, where hedging adds to moves instead of absorbing them.

Neither view is "right". They answer different questions:

• All / Deribit: where the big, slow book sits. Use it for the regime over days and weeks, and for the walls that matter at the monthly and quarterly expiries.
• All except Deribit: where the short-dated book sits. When price crosses this flip, the hedging on four exchanges changes direction even if the combined regime has not, which is often an early sign of a faster tape.

When both flips are on the same side of price, the two books agree. When price sits between them, as on 28 October, expect the short-term picture to be more nervous than the combined regime suggests.

The Last 30 Days in Numbers

Four days can be a coincidence, so we replayed BTC from 28 September to 28 October 2026, every 15-minute snapshot:

The combined flip and Deribit's flip sat far below price almost all month: a steady positive-gamma regime. Without Deribit the flip stayed within half a percent of price, and price spent four days in ten below it. The regime on the four exchanges disagreed with the combined one 37% of the time.

The last row uses the real alert rules (the 0.15% band around the flip and one confirming snapshot). So expect it: Retail alerts are much more frequent, about one and a half a day for BTC in October, against two a week for Total. That is the point of a short-horizon signal, and also the reason Retail is opt-in. A Retail flip did not reliably lead the Total one: only a third of them were followed by a Total flip in the same direction within 24 hours. Read it as a separate, faster regime, not as an early warning for the slow one.

How to Switch: "All except"

Open the context picker (the BTC · All · TOTAL pill at the top of the app). In the Exchange column, hover a venue and click except, or Shift+click it. From All that gives "all except this one", shown as All − Deribit. Click include to bring it back.

You can exclude more than one venue, and the chart, the levels and the flip all switch to that mix. The selection survives a reload. For mixes, the flip history starts on 29 September 2026.

Retail Flip Alerts in Telegram

The flip alerts in Telegram now come in two sets per crypto coin:

• Total: the flip of all five exchanges. This is the alert you already had; nothing changes for it.
• Retail: the flip of every exchange except Deribit, through the same confirmation rules (price has to cross into the other regime and hold there).

A Retail alert names the venues it was computed on and shows the Total flip next to it, so you see at a glance whether the two books agree:

🔄 BTC · Retail — Gamma Flip
Venues: Bybit, OKX, Derive, Binance (excl. Deribit)
Price crossed into the Negative regime.
Total flip: $79,643

The chart under the message is labelled BTC · RETAIL.

To turn it on: open @GammaFlipioBot, send /settings and tap BTC Retail (or ETH, SOL, XRP, HYPE). Each crypto coin has a Total and a Retail toggle, and you can keep both. Retail fires far more often than Total (see the numbers above), so start with the coin you actually trade. Select all still adds only Total, so nobody gets twice the messages without asking. Not connected yet? Link Telegram on your account page.

Retail alerts cover crypto only; US stocks, ETFs and indices have one venue set. A Retail alert is skipped for a cycle when Deribit has no data for the coin (Retail would then equal Total) or when one of the four exchanges is missing.

Caveats

• The split is by exchange, not by trader. "Retail" is a convenient name for the four venues, not a measured fact about their users.
• The numbers above are a snapshot from 28 October 2026. The share of Deribit changes with every expiry, and right after a big monthly or quarterly roll the two flips can sit much closer together.
• A flip is a regime line, not a price target. Crossing it changes how dealer hedging is likely to behave; it does not say where price goes next.

Try it: open BTC on All − Deribit, or turn on Retail in @GammaFlipioBot.