Bitcoin notched a new all-time high near $95,000 as options trading began on Bitcoin ETFs.

BlackRock's Bitcoin ETF, IBIT, was the first to see options activity, with more than $2 billion in notional exposure stacking up — an unusually high volume for a debut. In total, call options outweighed put options by about a four-to-one margin according to Bloomberg's count, indicating bets were more optimistic that Bitcoin's price would continue to rise.

“I think that that allows for leverage in the U.S. market pretty efficiently,” Douro Labs co-founder Mike Cahill told Coinage. “You certainly see that the leverage looks like it’s going on the long side so that’s quite a bullish correlation between the all-time highs and the options.”

Options contracts allow traders to make bets on where an underlying asset's price might move over a given time period. For Bitcoin, those bets had largely been restricted to sophisticated traders. With the launch of options on Bitcoin ETFs, those are now more accessible.

Following the launch of options on BlackRock's Bitcoin ETF, next up are options on Grayscale's Bitcoin ETF as well as Bitwise's Bitcoin ETF and others.

Custodia Bank founder Caitlin Long previously said that Bitcoin options could be a double-edged sword as it might allow for Wall Street to play games with an asset that unlike others is fundamentally scarce with a cap of 21 million tokens.

“It’s a double-edged sword,” Long said, referencing the typical leverage games that Wall Street is so adept at playing. “They privatize profits and socialize losses.” It’s a dynamic that anyone familiar with traditional finance knows all too well, and it’s one that has reared its head time and time again, whether in traditional equity markets or the now-infamous crypto exchange collapses like FTX.

As Long explained, “An ETF is a derivative. And then an option on an ETF is a derivative on a derivative.” It’s a classic case of stacking financial products on top of each other until the structure becomes dangerously fragile.

For now, Bitcoin's price is marching higher as options make their debut.