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

block-scholes-x-bybit-report.jpeg

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

flock.png

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

network3 tutorial.png

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.

2.png

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

Bybit Learn

Crypto

If you've been keeping up with the crypto space, chances are, you've heard of token burning. Read this article to find out what it is and why it's needed.

Maintaining the value of an asset can be difficult to accomplish. When it comes to cryptocurrency, many people worry about the high number of coins in circulation and the oversupply of coins that dilutes their value. This has led to several innovative ways to incentivize investors and help maintain a coin’s value.

Burning cryptocurrency is a popular method of boosting the value of a coin or token. Essentially, token burning removes coins from circulation, permanently decreasing the overall supply of the cryptocurrency. This helps to increase scarcity and raise the value of each remaining coin, which is crucial for coins that can be mined quickly.

Token burning means removing coins from the overall supply of a cryptocurrency. This typically involves sending the coins or tokens to a wallet with no known private keys. This wallet can only receive assets, thus effectively making them inaccessible.

While burning a small portion of coins can help maintain the value of a cryptocurrency, the token burning process is often a community effort. Occasionally, substantial token holders or persons with a large social media following will encourage a community burn. When everyone burns a small number of their holdings simultaneously, it can make a notable difference in the overall number of coins in circulation — and, therefore, in a coin’s value.

In other cases, token burning happens steadily over time. Many users don’t even notice it. For example, 

 burns a small percentage of Ether during each transaction. This adds up over time, which can increase the coin’s value as supply steadily decreases.

Cryptocurrencies generally have specific instructions and processes in place for burning tokens. The most common burn mechanism involves sending tokens to an unusable wallet address, effectively taking them out of circulation. Technically, therefore, all a user needs to do in order to burn coins is send them to a wallet with an invalid 

Some cryptocurrency projects establish their own token burn mechanisms. For example, in April 2022, Shiba Inu released an easy-to-use burn portal. By working with Ryoshis Visiondevelopers, Shiba Inu offers rewards to anyone using the burn portal to destroy SHIB tokens.

Other cryptocurrencies use a burn function to destroy assets. Binance Coin has a burn function that any cryptocurrency holder can execute simply by stating how many coins in their wallet they’d like to destroy. A 

 first checks to see if the holder has the coins available in their wallet, and then subtracts them. Binance Coin then automatically updates the total number of coins in circulation.

Keep in mind that any coins burned will be permanently removed from your account — and there’s no way to return them. Before you execute a burn function or send tokens to a null address, double-check to make sure that all of the amounts and information you’ve specified are correct.

In other cases, the token burning process is automatic. For example, some networks burn a small portion of cryptocurrency during mining, or as a transaction fee.

There are several reasons why cryptocurrency holders burn coins and tokens. As technology continues to expand, people are finding more innovative ways to utilize burning. Here are a few examples of how token burning can be used.

Proof of burn (PoB) is a consensus mechanism that verifies and validates a transaction. This algorithm enables miners to burn coins effectively with no energy waste. PoB can be verified using a blockchain explorer if needed.

PoB has several practical uses. It’s primarily used to prevent fraud by automatically verifying each transaction. It also maintains miners’ ability to mine new coins, as several cryptocurrencies require miners to burn coins first in order to mine new blocks.

Typically, token burning aims to reduce the overall supply of a cryptocurrency, thus raising demand. Theoretically, prices will rise if demand is high and token supply is low.

Another possible reason coin prices can increase after a burn is publicity. Many large token burns are community-driven. In some cases, these token burns are coordinated through social media. At other times, an investor will intentionally burn a large portion of the tokens in circulation and post about it on social media. This can raise awareness of the cryptocurrency, further increasing demand and raising the price per token.

Keeping a network efficient can be difficult. Every time a new token is created it reduces mining speed. This gives many early miners an unfair advantage over new users. Token burning grants miners the right to mine new tokens. Rather than burning one token when mining first begins, the process is spread out and, consequently, more proportionate.

In some cases, miners don’t need to burn the same token they’re mining. Because proof of burn is customizable, networks can offer a variety of rewards to miners. This encourages healthy network activity.

Token burning can impact a token’s value and price. Ultimately, the goal is to create a balance between supply and demand. Although it may not be the main factor causing a significant shift in token price, removing a number of tokens from circulation creates scarcity and potentially increases the value of the remaining tokens. This ensures that demand for the token remains the same or increases.

It’s essential to note that plenty of other factors can influence a token’s price movement, including market sentiment, project fundamentals, overall market conditions, investor perception, political changes and more. Token burning isn’t a guaranteed price appreciation strategy. In most cases, however, there’s a correlation between scheduled token burns and price volatility.

Overall, while token burning can impact coin prices, it’s just one factor among many that can influence the dynamics of the cryptocurrency market.

While destroying coins and tokens may seem counterproductive, there are several reasons why users burn their crypto.

Maintaining the Value of Coins for Investors

The goal of token burning is to stabilize prices and boost confidence among investors. When demand remains steady, decreasing the overall supply of a coin can lead to higher prices. By burning cryptocurrency regularly or with each transaction, many altcoins can steadily increase demand over time.

Behind some of the most popular altcoins are great communities. Successful blockchain projects tend to have several participants advancing them, and numerous investors actively using them. Large community-driven token-burning initiatives can inspire others to invest or become involved with a project.

Before you start burning tokens, there are several things to consider. If you aren’t burning coins to gain mining rights, you need to consider how token burning affects your portfolio. If the token burning is automatic, consider how often you’ll make cryptocurrency transactions. The way in which a cryptocurrency handles token burning can also influence your investment choices.

In order to burn tokens, you first need to own them. Once the token burn is completed, the tokens are permanently removed from your wallet. That means you no longer own those assets, even if the price per token skyrockets afterward. With some coins valued at well under a penny, this could lead to regret later, especially if you’re burning thousands of tokens at a time.

Before you burn tokens, consider the cryptocurrency’s current and expected value. Identify all of the factors that impact the coin’s price. Then, carefully think about how much you want to burn. Remember that you can’t undo a transaction once it’s completed.

Large Amounts Are Needed to Make an Impact

One of the biggest cons of token burning is that small amounts won’t greatly impact price. For example, there are over 

 (SHIB) coins currently in circulation. Burning a few thousand $SHIB wouldn’t affect the overall supply. However, the community has burned more than 263 billion $SHIB since October 2021, roughly 0.05% of the total circulating supply.

Any cryptocurrency can be burned. For example, an estimated 4 million bitcoins have been burned or lost. Other cryptocurrencies have adopted regular token burning into their strategies.

In 2021, Ethereum (ETH) introduced the EIP-1159 upgrade, restructured the fee model and began burning Ether with each transaction. 

Ethereum will transition its existing token model to a deflationary crypto asset. Over 3.4 million ETH have been burned using this controlled, steady method, which grows daily. The change in its protocol entails that a fraction of each transaction fee or gas fee will be burned on every successful transaction on the Ethereum blockchain network. Currently, the estimated 

 is about 1.63 ETH per minute in (24h) as of July 11, 2023.

 (SHIB) is often in the headlines for initiating large token burns. One way investors are encouraged to burn coins is via the burn portal, which was introduced in April 2022. However, Shiba Inu began making headlines for token burning long before that. About one year after the coin was launched, its creators sent Ethereum cofounder Vitalik Buterin 50% of the total SHIB supply. In response, Buterin 

 (BNB) is known for its Auto-Burn and the Pioneer Burn program. This strategy automatically reduces the number of total coins in circulation each quarter. The first BNB Auto-Burn was in October 2017, when 0.49% of the total supply was destroyed. Because each coin-burning event is automatic, and is based on price and the number of new blocks created on BNB Smart Chain (BSC), investors don’t need to worry about too large a portion of the supply being burned at once.

In addition to the Auto-Burn, Binance Coin (BNB) burns a portion of the gas fees associated with each transaction on the BNB Smart Chain. BNB burns take place once every quarter, and they just completed their 23rd quarterly BNB burn of 2023 in April, with a total of 

Sweat Coin is one of the first blockchains to let its community decide whether to burn tokens or not through decentralized governance votes. In April’s governance vote, Sweat Coin introduced a scheduled 100 million tokens for distribution and burning. Over 150,000 SWEAT token holders voted, with 59.487% opting for token distribution and 40.513% for token burning, translating to over 59 million tokens being distributed and more than 40 million being burned.

Token burning isn’t essential in order for a cryptocurrency to function. However, as discussed above, regularly burning tokens helps maintain a balance between supply and demand. Investors may focus on the impact coin burning can have on the value of a token, and miners may find coin burning necessary in order to mine new tokens on a network effectively.

While there’s no guarantee that coin burning will increase a cryptocurrency’s prices, it can be a helpful tool for maintaining value and incentivizing investors. 

If you invest in a cryptocurrency, examine its burn strategy to see if it aligns with your own goals. Whether you plan on manually burning coins or using a coin that automatically burns portions of its supply, always have a clear idea of what you’re investing in.

Token Burning: What Does Burning Crypto Mean?

Grab Up to 5,000 USDT in Rewards

Grab Up to 5,000 USDT in Rewards