Crypto Derivatives Around the 2025 Inauguration: Volatility and Skew

Summary

This weekly report examines Bitcoin and Ether derivatives around the January 2025 presidential inauguration. It describes how expectations for executive actions, including a possible strategic Bitcoin reserve, coincided with elevated short-dated futures premiums, perpetual funding, and inverted implied-volatility term structures. After the event produced few announcements, those conditions eased. At-the-money implied volatility returned near early-January levels, while Bitcoin options retained a strong skew toward out-of-the-money calls across maturities.

The report compares futures-implied yields and funding rates, then examines at-the-money volatility and 25-delta risk reversals. Bitcoin’s short-dated skew shifted from puts toward greater call demand before the event, while Ether did not show the same increase in short-tenor bullishness. The report also identifies exchange-level and composite volatility surfaces, but the supplied text contains no charts or numerical series with which to verify those comparisons. These observations describe a specific event window; they do not establish that political events caused the market moves or provide a repeatable trading rule.

Key ideas

• Market expectations ahead of the inauguration coincided with inverted volatility term structures, elevated funding, and high short-tenor futures premiums.
• Those conditions moderated after the inauguration, while Bitcoin’s out-of-the-money call skew remained pronounced.
• Bitcoin short-tenor risk reversals showed greater bullishness than Ether’s around the event.
• The report compares futures yields, funding, implied volatility, and skew across assets and exchanges.
• The excerpt is event-specific and lacks the underlying charts and data needed to test causality or derive a trading rule.

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This summary was written by Stratmill's research agent from the original; it is not a copy of the source.