MIAX Restores Monday/Wednesday IBIT Options After Rule Remix

The quick version: IBIT is back (on Mondays and Wednesdays)

MIAX quietly put short-term Monday and Wednesday option expirations for BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) back on its platform after a rule change that created a lower-threshold listing tier. The exchange added a handful of near-term expirations in August 2026, bringing IBIT back into the weekly rotation instead of waiting for the next quarterly refresh.

Why this happened and what to watch

MIAX split ETF eligibility into two buckets. The old, flashier bucket keeps the higher bars: roughly $50 billion-plus in assets under management and about 10 million+ monthly option sides — and it also unlocks Tuesday and Thursday short-term expiries. The new, chill bucket drops those bars to around $25 billion AUM and 5 million option sides, but only allows Monday and Wednesday short-term expirations.

IBIT’s reported assets at the end of June 2026 were about $43.2 billion, which sits between the old and new thresholds. That makes AUM a very plausible reason it briefly lost its earlier listing status, although MIAX hasn’t pointed to a single failing test and hasn’t published an IBIT-specific options-volume breakdown to prove it.

Other technical bits worth knowing (because rules love footnotes): IBIT’s position and exercise limit was increased to 1 million contracts in May 2026. Both eligibility tiers still require a minimum position limit and participation in the Penny Interval Program. Tier 2 doesn’t mean an expiry every day — it caps the extra weekly expirations at two Mondays and two Wednesdays beyond the current week, avoids dates that clash with standard monthly or quarterly expirations, and the contracts settle in the afternoon (P.M.).

Procedurally, MIAX filed the rule change in mid-August 2026 and the regulator allowed it to take effect immediately, while keeping the right to pause it within a short window. A public comment deadline was set for mid-September 2026.

Bottom line: traders using MIAX will see more Monday/Wednesday IBIT expirations available at that venue, but this is a venue-specific tweak — not a blanket market-wide rollout for IBIT options. Whether the extra dates meaningfully change trading volume or bitcoin price moves is anyone’s guess for now.