ETH risk reversal reverts to put premium after Pectra upgrade

Shift in Ethereum skew profile

ETH 25-delta risk reversal hit -8% following the Pectra upgrade. This movement follows a period where an ETH rally above $2,400 drove 7-day OTM call option skew toward a one-month high of nearly 4% towards calls. That call-side premium vanished after the price failed to hold above the $2,400 level. This failure returned the skew to a put premium. The market pays more for downside protection than for upside calls. For the 2026-09-18 expiration, calls show an average IV of 118.96% while puts show 55.28%, which reflects a transition from call-heavy demand back to the put-premium regime. In equity markets, index options have priced negative risk reversal for 35 years, driven by pension funds and insurance companies that buy downside protection. In contrast, crypto skew remains structurally positive because of retail call demand and miner-side covered call selling. The 25-delta butterfly, which measures the average of the wings minus the ATM IV, helps traders see if volatility remains bid in the tails. This spread provides a measure of how much volatility traders pay for the wings relative to the body.

Parameter	Value
ETH 30D 25-delta RR	-3.01 vol points
ETH 7D 25-delta RR	-1.57 vol points
ETH 2026-09-18 Call IV	118.96%
ETH 2026-09-18 Put IV	55.28%

Leading the Bitcoin recovery

ETH front-end skew often leads BTC risk reversal by one to two days during regime inflections. While the 30-day BTC risk reversal sits at -3.46 vol points, the 30-day ETH risk reversal measures -3.01. The 7-day ETH risk reversal sits at -1.57; this value occupies the 82nd percentile of its 90-day distribution, and it suggests that the front-end skew leads the broader normalization seen in the Bitcoin market. You should monitor the lead-lag relationship between these two assets. BTC risk reversal sits at the 98th percentile of its 90-day distribution at the 30-day tenor. This negative reading for BTC suggests the structural positive bias is recovering from a spot correction. BTC risk reversal is negative across the entire term structure, with 7D at -4.15, 60D at -3.71, and 90D at -3.79. Risk reversal measures the directional asymmetry of the smile by calculating the call IV at the 25-delta strike minus the put IV at the same delta. Because the BTC 30D RR is at the 98th percentile of its 90-day distribution, the put bid is weaker than nearly every session in the trailing window, and this shows a fading demand for downside protection.

Validator and protocol changes

The Pectra upgrade, which went live on 07-May-2025, changed how validators manage funds. EIP-7251 raised the maximum effective balance to 2,048 ETH, allowing stakers to hold between 32 and 2,048 ETH. Consensus-layer rewards compound automatically on the validator. This allows stakers to aggregate multiple validators into one, which reduces network overhead. EIP-7691 also increased the target blob count to 6 and the maximum to 9 per block. EIP-7623 increases calldata pricing for data-heavy transactions to protect the p2p network. EIP-7702 allows users to use programmable wallets through account abstraction. EIP-6110 provides a more secure way of delivering deposits from execution to the consensus layer. EIP-2537 adds new precompiles for curve operations over BLS12-381, which helps developers perform cryptographic operations like signature verification more efficiently. EIP-2935 creates a system contract to serve the last 8,192 block hashes as storage slots. EIP-7002 introduces a contract that allows stakers to trigger exits using execution layer withdrawal credentials. EIP-7549 moves the committee index outside the signed attestation message to improve verification efficiency, while EIP-7840 adds a field to execution layer client configuration to allow for dynamic setting of blob counts. Will the put-premium persist if spot prices consolidate below $2,400?