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

Bybit Learn

DeFi

SpartaDEX is a decentralized exchange and a real-time strategy game. As the first gamified DEX, SpartaDEX is both engaging and rewarding for users. Learn more.

Today’s promising blockchain game projects engage users in various ways, such as through a valuable community, the ability to generate in-game rewards and more. Often, users lose interest in these games because of a relatively simplistic game design. Now, a new strategy game known as SpartaDEX has taken user engagement to the next level while also adding the functionality of a decentralized cryptocurrency exchange (

SpartaDEX aims to immerse its users in an ancient Greek city, where they gather resources and strategically progress through the game while increasing their reward yield. The platform rewards liquidity providers through a dual rewards program. By establishing deeper liquidity, SpartaDEX is well-designed for launching promising projects.

SpartaDEX is a new project that stands out from other decentralized exchanges with its financial benefits for liquidity providers, as well as its strategic game and its gamified DEX. The SpartaDEX testnet 

 on Apr 4, 2023, and was most recently followed by the 

, mainnet and token launches in July and August 2023. Several aspects of the initial concept are still in the works, and the SpartaDEX developers will introduce other improvements going forward to maintain a high level of user engagement.

, SpartaDEX aims to support consistent liquidity provision, as well as a fun gaming experience for its community. By combining a strategy game set in ancient Greece with a decentralized exchange, SpartaDEX establishes deeper liquidity for its supported game projects and increases user engagement. Players earn a gamified yield based on their progression through the game, which is marked by tradable NFTs. The project also aims to build a valuable community, reward each SpartaDEX user through a dual rewards mechanism, provide single asset staking (SAS) and establish a community-managed exchange.

SpartaDEX functions on Arbitrum, which is a 

 that offers speed, lower transaction fees and scalability. These traits are essential for gaming projects. At the same time, the SpartaDEX ecosystem utilizes Ethereum for enhanced security. Looking forward, SpartaDEX will expand to other popular blockchains to take advantage of their various and unique benefits.

The SpartaDEX ecosystem includes gameplay, swapping and an SDEX Lockdrop.

As mentioned, in this real-time strategy game, SpartaDEX users develop an ancient Greek city. This is accomplished by conquering barbarians, expanding territory, building the economy, gathering resources and more. Experience in the game determines progress, and this results in a greater real yield.

A polis is a Greek town run as an autonomous city-state. In order to start this strategy game, a new user must mint a 

. To make progress in the game, the polis must be upgraded by adding liquidity to SpartaDEX liquidity pools. The Polis NFT is an asset that can be sold, and developing the polis increases its value in the secondary market.

In addition to building an ancient Greek city, users can take advantage of 

. These digital assets represent ancient Greek heroes, and they play a crucial role in the SpartaDEX ecosystem. Users have access to select NFTs at the beginning of the game, and others will become available as progress is made. Spartans NFTs each have unique incentives and utilities. Those who hold Spartans NFTs can participate in special quests and earn in-game rewards, use the upcoming multiplayer mode that will be implemented in Q4 2023 and the SpartaDEX launchpad, and participate in the SPARTA airdrop.

 is the control system for the game. This aspect of SpartaDEX combines on-chain and off-chain functions, including LP staking, claiming airdrop rewards, single asset staking, contributing to liquidity pools, community voting and more. When a polis has a higher Senate level, the user qualifies for a higher real yield through LP staking.

 in the game supports moving to a higher Senate level. There are 50 Senate levels. Experience is gained by conquering barbarians, locking assets in the SpartaDEX Lockdrop and further developing the polis.

Both on-chain and off-chain transactions are made in the 

 on Arbitrum and the exchange of tokens for gems. In addition, resources can be purchased with gems in the Market.

In a user’s ancient Greek polis, there are various 

 (in addition to the Senate) that serve unique purposes in the game. Most of them can be upgraded, and the upgrades will result in a rise in overall Senate level. 

There are three mining buildings: the Gold Mine, the Lumber Camp and the Quarry. As these buildings get upgraded, the production volume and storage capacity also increase. Other structures are the Temple, Barracks, Academy, Walls and Treasury.

 to upgrade their buildings. While most buildings require wood, Walls and select other structures only require an increasing number of hours playing the game to make upgrades. The Senate can only be upgraded in conjunction with equivalent upgrades to other functional buildings.

In the Barracks, users can exchange gems or gold for army 

. The level of units available is determined by the Barracks’ level, and the availability of the units that the user can recruit is based on the Academy’s development level. Units include militia, acolytes, hoplites, cavalry, slingers, archers, centaurs and minotaurs.

 reside outside the ancient Greek polis, and can cause destruction by raiding the city. Players can use their units to attack barbarians. When a user successfully attacks barbarians, their experience, resources and even gems are unlocked. Sections of a Map NFT may also be obtained. On the other hand, a loss results in the player’s loss of the attacking units.

 is determined by an algorithm that takes into account unit strength, number of units, morale and other factors. The algorithm will result in the entire loss of the losing party’s units, while the winning party will lose only part of their units.

Through battles against barbarians, fragments of a full 

 are earned. Altogether, there are 20 fragments in a Map NFT. By holding a full Map NFT, a user qualifies for a monthly drawing. The drawing winners receive SPARTA tokens.

The currency used in the SpartaDEX game is 

, which can be purchased in the game’s Market with SPARTA tokens. Gems are used for functions such as buying minotaurs, completing research at the Academy, purchasing a premium account, reducing the time to build upgrades and buying resources.

 are used in the SpartaDEX game: gold, stone and wood. Respectively, users can gather these resources in a Gold Mine, Quarry and Lumber Camp. Resources can be purchased with gems and securely stored in the Treasury. They are essential for expanding each user’s ancient Greek city.

 can be purchased using gems in the Temple. Account terms are available for a day, month, year or lifetime. With a premium account, the user can increase resource production and troop morale and stats, and expand building and recruitment.

 was launched through three phases between July and August 2023. It provides deeper liquidity through users who lock their tokens. Those who contribute liquidity receive SPARTA token rewards, and there’s a 

SPARTA, the native token, can be exchanged or 

 in the game’s Market. While SpartaDEX is gamified, its Market functions as marketplaces on other decentralized exchanges. Small transaction fees are charged based on the value of the 

, which are completed using SpartaDEX’s well-designed interface.

The SpartaDEX ecosystem launched in multiple stages so that developers could get feedback and fine-tune mechanisms and features before the full release. These stages are the testnet phase launch in March 2023, the partners acquisition between April and August 2023 and the launch of the Lockdrop, token and mainnet in August 2023. 

The developers will continue innovating upgrades to the platform to progressively elevate its utility and its appeal to users.

SPARTA is the native token of SpartaDEX. The token is used for community governance, to purchase gems in the game and as a reward for staking. There is a total supply of 100 million SPARTA tokens, distributed as follows:

The current price of SPARTA as of Aug 21, 2023 is $0.3055. This reflects a decrease of 6.3% over the last 24 hours. The market cap is $1.1 million, and the trading volume for the last 24 hours is $38,037. SPARTA tokens have a circulating supply of close to 3.6 million. The ATH price of $0.861476 occurred on Aug 10, 2023, and the ATL of $0.267054 was on Aug 17, 2023.

Several sources have analyzed data for the SpartaDEX project, and anticipate that the token price will increase over the next several years. CoinArbitrageBot, for example, 

 the SPARTA token will be valued at $0.41938 by the end of 2023, $1.53284 in 2025 and $1.31294 in 2027. This positive outlook is supported by DigitalCoinPrice, 

 SPARTA’s price will increase to $0.68 by the end of 2023, $1.08 by 2025, $1.41 by 2027 and $3.22 by 2030.

SPARTA can be traded on Bybit as a Spot trading pair, and can be used to participate in community governance, purchase gems for gameplay and support the project through providing liquidity. To complete a trade on Bybit using the 

, you must first establish a Bybit account if you don’t already have one. 

To celebrate this listing, Bybit is holding 

 for users to split a 40,000 USDT prize pool.

For new users, simply complete the following steps between Aug 10, 2023, 8AM UTC through Aug 24, 2023, 8AM UTC, and be among the first 1,000 new users to receive 30 USDT:

If you;ve already created a Bybit account prior to Aug 10, 2023, 8AM UTC, you can also earn 10 USDT by accumulating a deposit volume of at least 200 SPARTA, or by depositing 100 USDT and buying 100 USDT worth of SPARTA with your Bybit account. Please note that only the first 1,000 users will be able to receive this reward.

SpartaDEX rewards liquidity providers with a real yield to support its project’s stability, and offers the benefits of both Arbitrum and Ethereum. While SpartaDEX is a newer gaming project, it’s rightfully receiving ample attention in the crypto world. Between the opportunity for users to earn dual rewards on SpartaDEX and the SPARTA token’s projected price increase, this innovative project could be a good investment. However, because of the volatility and speculative nature of the crypto market, it’s important to complete your 

As the first gamified DEX on Arbitrum that also stands apart with its dual rewards and strategy game, SpartaDEX is a project that’s well-suited to those who wish to support the evolution of crypto projects. At the same time, SpartaDEX offers strategic gameplay and LP rewards. This new project will continue to develop, so consider learning more and getting involved today.

SpartaDEX (SPARTA): Enhancing Experiences With a Gamified DEX

Grab Up to 5,000 USDT in Rewards

Grab Up to 5,000 USDT in Rewards