Our weekly crypto derivatives analytics report delves into macro events, the current state of crypto and trading signals from spot trading volume, and futures, options and perpetual contracts.

December's end-of-year options expiration brought an unexpected drop as realized volatility fell to the lowest levels of the month. Perpetual swap open interest remained stable, indicating these markets weren't heavily used for hedging against expired options, likely contributing to the muted volatility. 

While most expired open interest in Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH) hasn't been reinvested, the balance of calls and puts remains consistent. Notably, ETH options are pricing in higher implied volatility as compared to BTC, particularly for shorter expirations, leading to a flat term structure for ETH, while BTC is offering cheaper options exposure.

In the perpetual markets, low volatility and minimal spot movements have led funding rates for nearly all tokens to mirror broader market sentiment throughout the holiday season. On the options side, BTC's term structure is noticeably lower and steeper than ETH's, with realized volatility now dipping below implied volatility levels, highlighting an intriguing shift in market dynamics.

Please check out the report’s highlights.

Open Interest Solid Amid Year-End Options Expiration

Although open interest for both BTC and ETH perpetual swaps hasn’t returned to early December 2024 highs, it remained robust throughout the significant end-of-year options expiration event. This suggests that these markets weren’t heavily utilized to 

 of the expiring options contracts, likely contributing to the lack of volatility observed during this period. Instead, trading volumes have dipped noticeably during the winter holiday season, coinciding with a collapse in realized volatility back to December 2024’s lowest levels.

BTC Option Curve Remains Steep During Call-Put Parity

The expiration of December's end-of-year options didn’t trigger the anticipated surge in volatility; instead, realized volatility has plummeted to the lower end of its recent range. The implied volatility term structure remains steep compared to both its recent behavior and ETH's, with longer-dated implied volatility around 57%, and 1-week at-the-money options trading about five points lower. Much of the expired open interest hasn’t yet been rolled into new positions, maintaining a neutral balance between puts and calls. Consequently, BTC's options market positioning is relatively neutral, lacking the leverage it had at the start of December 2024.

Huge ETH Option Expiring Doesn’t Cause Volatility

A late December spike in realized volatility didn’t carry into the new year, with ETH’s spot price currently exhibiting volatility below that of short-tenor implied volatility. Interestingly, the implied volatility term structure has undergone a steepening and re-flattening over the past week, contrasting with BTC’s slightly steeper profile. This suggests that ETH’s options market is anticipating higher short-term volatility in spot price movements. 

Despite the significant expiration of options open interest at the end of December 2024, which didn’t lead to a rollover into later expirations, call options continue to dominate the market and have increased at the start of 2025.

Advanced

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Bybit X Block Scholes Crypto Derivatives Analytics Report (Jan 2, 2025): BTC Options Continue to See Call-Put Parity, With Lower Short-Term Volatility Expected

Dive into FLock, a decentralized platform that revolutionizes the way AI models are developed, trained and deployed.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is poised to transform countless industries, but its development often raises questions about privacy, control and inclusivity. 

 is a unique decentralized platform that democratizes AI training, fine-tuning and inferencing. With its blockchain-powered infrastructure, FLock ensures transparency, security and community-driven decision-making, paving the way for AI models that align with established societal values. 

In this article, we’ll explore how FLock decentralizes AI training, its key features and its potential impact on developers, communities and users.

 platform that revolutionizes the way AI models are developed, trained and deployed. By leveraging blockchain technology and a novel approach called 

, FLock addresses critical issues in AI development, such as centralized control, lack of transparency and privacy concerns.

At its core, FLock’s mission is to democratize AI by enabling communities to participate directly in the creation and refinement of AI models. Through federated learning, FLock trains AI models across multiple decentralized devices or servers. This method ensures that data remains local, eliminating the need for raw data exchange while still enabling robust model training. By decentralizing the training process, FLock not only protects individual privacy, but also fosters a more inclusive ecosystem in which diverse contributors can collaborate.

What sets FLock apart is its integration of 

. This ensures that all contributions — whether data, compute power or feedback — are transparently recorded and fairly rewarded. Blockchain tech’s immutable ledger enhances trust among participants and safeguards the process against manipulation. Additionally, the platform’s on-chain incentive mechanisms encourage participation from a wide range of contributors, ensuring that rewards are distributed equitably.

Ultimately, FLock empowers communities to develop bespoke AI models tailored to their specific needs. By decentralizing the process and prioritizing transparency and collaboration, FLock breaks the monopoly of large corporations, creating an AI ecosystem that aligns with public ethics and societal values.

, an Oxford alumnus with a robust background in AI and blockchain technology. Sun, who serves as FLock's CEO, has an impressive career trajectory, having worked as the Director of AI for the Royal Bank of Canada and as an AI Research Fellow at Imperial College London. His vision for FLock stems from a deep understanding of both the technical and ethical challenges of AI development.

The founding team also includes other Oxford alumni, boasting over a decade of combined experience in AI research and the cryptocurrency industry. This team brings a collective blend of academic excellence and practical expertise that positions FLock to lead the decentralized AI movement.

FLock has successfully raised $11 million in funding across two rounds, reflecting strong investor confidence in its vision. In May 2024, FLock secured a $6 million seed round co-led by Lightspeed Faction and Tagus Capital, with additional backing from Digital Currency Group (DCG), Volt Capital, OKX Ventures and Inception Capital.

Later, in December 2024, FLock announced a $3 million successful funding round led by DCG and joined by prominent names like Animoca Brands, Fenbushi Capital, GnosisVC and GSR. These investments are being channelled into enhancing the platform’s testnet and federated learning client, accelerating FLock’s mission of enabling secure, collaborative AI development.

With this funding and over 1,500 nodes contributing from platforms like Numerai and Kaggle, FLock is rapidly scaling its impact on decentralized AI training.

FLock AI revolutionizes AI development through its decentralized training framework. This approach allows participants to contribute to AI model training without ever sharing their personal data. Instead, models are trained locally across devices using federated learning, which ensures that data remains with its owners while still enhancing the accuracy of the model overall. 

FLock’s reward system is designed to incentivize active participation. Contributors who provide data, computational power and/or feedback are compensated with FLOCK tokens, ensuring a fair distribution of rewards. 

FLock empowers its community through a robust governance framework. Decisions regarding AI model development, deployment and ethical considerations are driven by the community, ensuring alignment with established societal values. Through blockchain-based voting mechanisms, contributors can influence the direction of AI projects, fostering transparency and public accountability. 

FLock’s modular architecture allows contributors to participate in specific aspects of AI model development. Whether providing raw data or computational power or even refining algorithms, the platform enables a collaborative and scalable development process. 

At the core of FLock’s philosophy is its commitment to privacy and security. By leveraging blockchain technology, the platform ensures that no single entity controls the AI development process. Data remains local and protected by cryptographic measures, while the immutability of blockchain guarantees transparency in every transaction and model update. 

 begins with a blockchain and an AI layer.

The blockchain layer underpins FLock’s incentivization and security mechanisms.

The AI layer facilitates model training, refinement and deployment, leveraging both centralized and federated approaches.

Let’s have a look at the supply and demand for the FLOCK token.

FLock adopts a 1:2 ratio model between team/investors (33.3%) and community (66.7%), prioritizing community-driven growth and ecosystem expansion. The majority of tokens are allocated to incentivize user participation and long-term ecosystem success.

FLock aims to improve the future of AI development by decentralizing the training process and ensuring transparency, privacy and inclusivity. By leveraging blockchain and federated learning, FLock empowers communities to contribute to AI creation without compromising on privacy. Its innovative reward system and community-driven governance foster a fair and collaborative ecosystem. 

With significant backing and a growing network of contributors, FLock is positioning itself as a leader in decentralized AI, offering a more ethical and secure alternative to traditional AI development models. As it continues to scale, FLock is set to transform the way AI models are built and deployed.

 — and earn a share of a 10 million FLOCK prize pool. For more details, visit 

Intermediate

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FLock AI: Decentralized AI Training

In this tutorial, we’ll explore how you can complete a series of tasks in Network3 for Bybit Web3 Airdrop Arcade.

Task 1: Register for a Network3 Account and Connect Your Bybit Wallet 

: Navigate to the campaign page and click on the 

task. Click on the task, and Galxe will ask to redirect you to the Network3 register page.

: Register for a Network3 account using your email address. You may indicate a 

Task 2: Download the Network3 App and Run a Node for One Hour

 and choose your operating system to download the Network3 app.

 or powerbutton, depending upon which operating system you’re using. For ease of reference, we’ve used macOS and iOS as examples below.

: Keep running the node until the timer reaches 

Beginner

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How to Complete Network3 Tasks for Bybit Web3 Airdrop Arcade

Bybit launched the Bybit Merch Creative Challenge for university students worldwide, offering a $50,000 USDT prize pool.

The S&P 500 dropped 0.22% on Thursday, its fifth straight decline, with investors eyeing Friday’s economic updates. Coindesk Indices, an index measuring broader cryptocurrency market performance was up by 2.03%, with Bitcoin and Ether rising by 2.79% and 2.70%, respectively in the past 24 hours.

Today's top performer is XRP, which surged 1.9% following a rise in price driven by increased open interest and positive market sentiment.

Ripple (XRP), launched in August 2012, is a blockchain technology company focused on improving international payments with its cryptocurrency, XRP. XRP price surged due to increased open interest, a major XRP transfer, and market sentiment linked to Trump's inauguration. Bullish momentum is supported by high short liquidations, with key resistance levels to watch for further price movement.

Check Out the Latest Prices, Charts, and Data of 

 for university students worldwide, offering a $50,000 USDT prize pool. Participants can design exclusive Bybit merchandise, with submissions open until Jan. 15, 2025. Winners will be announced on Feb. 1, 2025, across four prize categories.

Yesterday, Bitcoin Spot ETFs recorded a total inflow of $84.8M, driven by $107.9M from non-GBTC funds, partially offset by a $23.1M outflow from GBTC.

, offering an airdrop for participants who complete tasks like swapping and bridging using the Mango wallet. Points earned through tasks determine airdrop rewards. Join via the Mango wallet and follow steps on the testnet dashboard.

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Bybit Launches $50,000 Merch Design Challenge for University Students Worldwide

Altcoins

Blockchain

GameFi

Explainers

Verasity (VRA) is an attention-based video and gaming platform built on the Ethereum blockchain that aims to solve the current advertising model

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You don’t have to be a millennial to have heard of the games

. Indeed, electronic sports (esports) have taken over the globe. According to 

, the projected number of monthly esports viewers in the U.S. in 2022 stands at 29.6 million. From interactive 

 projects to fancy merchandise on esports platforms, the gaming industry is rife with opportunities.

However, despite the multibillion-dollar revenue streams available in the esports industry, a huge chunk is getting lost through advertising fraud. 

, out of the $455 billion spent on advertisements, approximately 40% is lost to ad fraud as the advertisements are actually watched by bots rather than humans.

Verasity was created because of this very challenge. Complete with an innovative esports platform and advanced adtech structure, Verasity is on a mission to disrupt fraud in the gaming and video content industry by leveraging 

Let’s dig deeper into the ambitious Verasity network and examine how it’s strategically positioned to cause a seismic shift in the world of esports one token at a time.

Laser-focused on esports, Verasity is an attention-based video and gaming platform built on the 

 that aims to solve the current advertising model.

 Founded in 2018 by RJ Mark, a seasoned tech hardware and software developer for over 25 years, Verasity aims to integrate with video platforms such as YouTube and Vimeo to provide crypto rewards to viewers and create a fair system for platforms to earn more revenue.

Their core focus lies in preventing ad fraud. Using the patented Proof of View (PoV) technology, Verasity seeks to eliminate the systematic scams plaguing digital advertising on esports networks. Brands are losing billions to malicious players who use bots and other avenues to manipulate views. Unlike 

 that can safely execute a user’s game plan, ad bots are abusive and destructive to a platform.

Additionally, Verasity has developed a robust 

(non-fungible token) authentication chain to curb fraud by creating blockchain-based ownership of esports assets. Verasity aims to take advantage of the NFT boom in the crypto space to give value to esports lovers around the globe.

VRA is Verasity’s native token. It’s convenient to use for staking, earning and spending on the Verasity ecosystem. 

VRA can be easily earned by watching video content and ads, which helps raise engagement and, in turn, revenue for video platforms. Available for trade in multiple cryptocurrency exchanges, VRA started as an 

Verasity presents a unique approach to anti-fraud prevention in the adtech sector through a strategic interplay of 

 technology. The duo work hand-in-hand to provide benefits for all three parties involved in the video streaming platform — advertisers, creators and viewers. 

VeraViews is a blockchain-based adtech stack that uses off-chain and on-chain elements to ensure video ads reach real users. 

 (PoV) is a patented system that securely verifies audience views, recording the metrics on an immutable public blockchain.

Using PoV tech, VeraViews can confidently detect whether a bot or human is viewing an ad based on real-time viewer behavior. Traditionally, any questionable views needed a detailed fraud analysis that could take months, causing delayed payments to advertisers. 

First, brands or agencies initiate a VeraViews ad campaign by depositing VRA tokens to the VeraWallet. This action creates an 

 pool that pays publishers and rewards participating viewers.

Viewers watch the ads, and PoV retrieves the statistics to analyze in real time. Each valid ad view logged in the blockchain unlocks the escrow pool and distributes the VRA tokens to the publishers and viewers. 

In this way, VeraViews ensures that brands and sponsors pay for only valid and verifiable ad engagement; creators and publishers get paid within a few days; and viewers are rewarded for watching ads.

Apart from VeraViews adtech stack, there are several other verticals that constitute the Verasity ecosystem. They are:

 is the vault of Verasity’s ecosystem. As the official wallet for VRA, users can store, earn and stake tokens on it. As mentioned earlier, the wallet has an escrow feature that lets video publishers and advertisers fund their ad campaigns. Their pooled VRA tokens are rewarded to viewers for watching the ads.

VRA token holders can also stake their assets and receive an 18.25 percent annual yield in VRA rewards. As VRA is an ERC-777 token compatible with any Ethereum-based wallet, users can seamlessly transfer their VRA tokens from their VeraWallet to an Ethereum-compatible wallet.

 is a platform that integrates esports with digital currencies to transform the way people play and watch esports. Its incentivized model creates endless opportunities for gaming enthusiasts to get rewarded with VRA tokens for watching and competing in game tournaments. The earnings made in VRA tokens can then be used to redeem in-game currencies and items. VeraEsports has partnered with some of the biggest names in the gaming industry, such as 

, to bring gamers world-class tournaments. 

Through its robust website, players can join both public and private tournaments and even create tournaments complete with a prize pool and rules. Its intuitive API also lets users connect third-party tournaments to the platform.

program, viewers get rewarded with VRA tokens for actions on the publisher site. A custom-built SDK allows integration with some of the world’s most popular publisher sites such as YouTube, Twitch, JW Player and Brightcove, among others.

A video player that supports the program can be identified through a trophy icon on the top right of the platform’s interface. When the trophy turns green and you click on it, you’ll be directed to VeraWallet, where you’ll receive VRA tokens for watching content on these video players. Viewers can also consume plenty of rich content directly on 

These strategic integrations on Verasity imply that its network is ready to connect with millions of publishers and users who already support online video players. The Watch & Earn program provides a real-world use case for VRA through the reward model.

Verasity has also developed its own online video player, VeraPlayer, which utilizes sophisticated technology to create a user-friendly cost-effective platform.

Broadcasters can connect to the cloud directly using a laptop as opposed to relying on a server farm to broadcast. This innovative feature cuts down costs for broadcasters drastically since it eliminates the need to invest in expensive server equipment. Meanwhile, viewers can easily watch content from any browser without having to install extra software or plug-ins.

VeraWallet is also built into the VeraPlayer, which allows viewers to track their rewards from watching content from Verasity.tv or brand campaign ads. 

VeraVerse is an advanced NFT ecosystem on Verasity that will escort Verasity into the lucrative world of NFTs. 

Through its gaming partners, Verasity will collect and create in-game items and content. These authentic digital items will be available on the platform’s NFT marketplace.

Since it can already track viewership through the VeraEsports platform, Verasity aims to create value for NFTs through VeraVerse. Additionally, VeraVerse will leverage PoV technology on VeraViews to store data related to 

. The information will help identify the origin of the art and authenticate the seller, which will help reduce NFT fraud drastically.

Verasity (token ticker: VRA) has a maximum supply of 20 billion VRA tokens, of which 50% has been burned as of Oct 2, 2023, leaving a circulating supply of 10 billion. 

While many crypto price aggregator portals like CoinGecko and CoinMarketCap include an extra 90 billion tokens in its maximum supply, these 90 billion tokens are actually PoV tokens issued on the same contract as VRA tokens. 

PoV tokens power Verasity’s ad stack technology and are meant to serve as marker tokens to assist with data circulation price in the network. While released on the same contract, PoV tokens will not affect the circulating supply of VRA tokens. Nevertheless, the confusion between these two tokens has led the VRA team to propose a plan to 

Similar to most coins in the crypto market, VRA’s price isn’t immune to volatility, and has witnessed various price swings over the years. In April 2021, Verasity price hit its first all-time high of $0.05, then came tumbling down to $0.01 in May. 

Since then, however, the VRA price started a long descent that stretched into 2022. From late April 2022, it fell below its support price of $0.02, dropping to a low of $0.005 in June after the 

. In early 2023, Verasity saw a positive uptrend, rising to $0.01 in mid-February. However, the uptrend did not last long, and Verasity soon plummeted to hover between $0.004 and $0.006 over the rest of 2023.

Price prediction experts hold a conservatively optimistic view of this token. Both 

 have similar projections for VRA, believing that VRA price will grow to between $0.01 and $0.02 in 2025 and exceed $0.06 by 2030. .

Verasity aims to provide anti-fraud solutions for NFTs and in the advertising space. By creating products such as VeraViews and Proof of View, it’s headed in the right direction when it comes to authenticating digital items and eliminating abusive players in adtech. 

 is also packed with exciting new developments, such as the enhancement of VeraViews technology with machine-learning and artificial intelligence modules and the rollout of VeraCard as a complement to the VeraWallet. The introduction of VeraCard will likely give the VRA token even more utility and value.

Keep in mind that our views aren’t meant as investment advice. Since the market is highly volatile and largely unpredictable, it’s paramount to do your own research and follow the latest crypto news before investing in any crypto asset.

VRA is available on leading crypto exchanges such as Bybit. You can buy VRA on Bybit by creating an account on the platform and funding it with USDT. Once funded, you can trade the 

 Perpetual Contract on Bybit’s intuitive trading terminal. 

From Oct 31 to Nov 13, 2023, Bybit is hosting 

, offering a total prize pool of 50,000 USDT! In the first event, you can earn from a 25,000 USDT prize pool by accumulating a Spot trading volume of at least 500 USDT worth of VRA. The second event allows you to trade VRA with a 

 for a chance to win from a 5,000 USDT prize pool. Finally, in the third event, trade a minimum of 100,000 USDT worth of VRAUSDT to earn from a 20,000 USDT prize pool. Don't miss out on these exciting opportunities!

In the few years that Verasity has been in the crypto space, its accomplishments have been formidable as compared to those of similar technologies, especially in the Video on Demand market. The platform’s VeraEsports tournaments have also been a force to reckon with in the esports industry.

Backed by a solid leadership and development team, Verasity is on track with its revamped road map to deliver game-changing products to the esports and adtech industry.

Verasity: Revolutionizing Adtech and Esports with VRA Crypto

Grab Up to 5,000 USDT in Rewards

Grab Up to 5,000 USDT in Rewards