While Ethereum made history by surpassing Bitcoin in the options market, the price of the ETH futures contract began to fall.

For the first time ever, Ether (ETH) has surpassed Bitcoin (BTC) in the options market as the open interest (OI) of Deribit Ether options, with a value of $5.6 billion, exceeded the OI of Bitcoin options, with a value of $4.6 billion.

When a trade is opened, all of the contracts are added together, and when a trade is closed, all of the contracts are subtracted. It serves as a gauge for assessing market sentiment and the tenacity of price trends. More than 90% of all trading volume on the planet takes place on Deribit, the largest BTC and ETH options exchange.

With a put/call ratio of 0.26, the data from the Deribit exchange showed that the majority of ETH options are call options. As the Merge date approaches, the ETH Put/Call ratio has fallen to a new annual low.

When purchasing a put option, buyers have the choice whether to sell the underlying asset at a predetermined price on or before a specified date, but they are not required to. Put buyers are generally implicitly bearish, whereas call option traders are generally bullish.

Put/call ratio values lower than 0.7 and falling close to 0.5 indicate an emerging bullish trend, while put/call ratio values higher than 0.7 and exceeding one indicate bearish market sentiment.

The upcoming Merge, scheduled for the third week of September, is being blamed for the recent spike in ETH OI in the options market and the underlying bullish sentiment among traders.

The ETH futures quarterly contracts, due to expire in December 2022, have slipped into backwardation, where the futures price becomes less than the spot price, even though ETH continues to gain market share in the options market. On Monday, the spot and futures price of ether increased to -$8. Although this might appear to be a negative outlook, BTC rose 15% following a price backwardation in June.

Analysts have mentioned both the potential airdrop scenario and the growing bullish anticipation for the impending proof-of-stake (PoS) transition. According to a Galois Capital survey, 53.7% of respondents expected a smooth network transition, compared to 33.1% who thought the upgrade would result in a hard fork.