$1.26B in Ethereum options expire on Friday and bulls are ready to push ETH price higher

cointelegraph.com:

Ether's (ETH) 53% rally between July 13 and 18 gave bulls an edge in July's $1.26 billion monthly options expiry. The move happened as Ethereum developers set a tentative date for the "Merge," a transition out of the burdensome proof-of-work (PoW) mining mechanism.

According to some analysts, by removing the additional ETH issuing used to finance the energy cost required on traditional mining consensus, Ether could finally achieve the "ultra-sound money" status.

On Beacon Chain, the issuance will be around 1,600 ETH per day decreasing the inflation significantly from 13,000 ETH per day on PoW. Merge sets effects on monetary policies of Ethereum to become Ultrasound money.(10/15) pic.twitter.com/9hWjhuGpNK

Whether or not sound monetary policy revolves around constantly changing the issuing and burning rules remains an open question, but there's no doubt that the Ethereum developers' video call on July 14 helped to catapult ETH price.

On July 26, a sudden dramatic spike in Ethereum network active addresses raised multiple speculations about whether Ether is targeting its previous all-time high. Analytics firm Santiment reported that the number of 24-hour daily active addresses reached 1.06 million, breaking the previous 718,000 high set back in 2018. Theories such as "Binance doing a maintenance sweep" emerged, but nothing has been confirmed yet.

The main victims of Ether's impressive 20% recovery on July 27 were leveraged bearish traders (shorts) who faced $335 million in aggregate liquidations at derivatives exchanges, according to data from Coinglass.

The open interest for Ether's July monthly options expiry is $1.27 billion, but the actual figure will be lower since bears were overly-optimistic. These traders got too