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

web3

CyberConnect allows users to create digital identities and social connections that they can seamlessly transfer between a variety of unique DApps. Learn more.

 to everyday life has some exciting social applications. One particularly promising project is CyberConnect. 

, CyberConnect hopes to make it easier for people to connect socially while still enjoying a variety of decentralized applications (

). Our guide will explain how CyberConnect works so you can decide if you want to invest in the project, or try it out for yourself.

 that consists of Wilson Wei (CEO), Ryan Li (CTO), Zhimao Liu (VP of Engineering) and Shiyu Zhang (Head of Product). The project's developers met while working at BitTorrent and became interested in potential uses for web3 design. They realized that blockchain technology could be a useful way to build digital identities and to network with others.

The CyberConnect team decided to make a community combining social networking with brand-new DApp and blockchain concepts. This basic inspiration underwent a lot of changes in the early years. Earlier versions of the project brought up new issues that the team had to rush to solve. After a few iterations, they eventually settled on a design that prioritizes security, scalability and user convenience.

The basic aim of CyberConnect is to find a way for users and developers to build a social network based on blockchain technology. This is a somewhat broad concept that other developers have tried before, but CyberConnect stands out with its

. First of all, they hope to create a system that lets users maintain ownership over their own digital identity and data. Secondly, they hope to design a network where developers can seamlessly launch new DApps that integrate with pre-existing user accounts.

To accomplish these goals, CyberConnect has had to tackle a few essential problems:

To achieve all of its goals, CyberConnect starts with an identity layer. A user creates an account by connecting a wallet and entering basic authentication information, which is then used to make a single, unchangeable digital identity for that user. It's essentially like the email and password you use for standard social media. You can attach public information such as user names, profile pictures and bio information to your underlying identity.

CyberConnect then takes your holistic identity and connects it to a social graph layer filled with 

. This layer contains transfers to multiple blockchains and DApps. You can use the same identity to connect with all of them, and your behavior in these DApps transfers back to your main identity in the identity layer. This allows seamless transfer of things like cryptocurrency, user authorizations and digital property.

Participants in CyberConnect’s decentralized social protocol enjoy a variety of useful features.

 system is a set of smart contracts that all combine to create a holistic digital identity. CyberAccounts come in many forms, so you can pick between an individual user account and a group account for a brand or team. These accounts are 

 compatible, and they use cryptographic key pairs to ensure security.

CyberIDs are basically user handles that link to your account and provide a public face for your identity. As an ERC-721 token, CyberIDs are also 

 is a fun project that encourages users to explore other features of CyberConnect. Its two-month journey guides users through six different blockchain networks and their top DApps. Participating allows you to collect NFTs, CYBER tokens and raffle tickets for further rewards.

To participate in the trek, you'll need to create a CyberAccount, mint a 

 and fund your account with tokens worth at least $10.

CyberConnect is more than just an interface for linking users to multiple apps. Its true singularity comes from the transferable social connections that it creates. This decentralized social graph protocol is managed through the 

, a set of smart contracts that allows users to be social media creators who make their own content and connect with fellow users. With the CyberGraph system, people can access these network effects.

Creators can make posts, images, videos and other content that’s kept in decentralized storage and linked to your CyberAccount. You retain control over this content, and can monetize it and decide who has access to it.

 is a web3 status token that allows users to define social communities. W3STs are NFTs that people use to determine roles within their decentralized social graph protocol. You can join communities of like-minded people or build a collection of followers.

If desired, users can set up subscription programs. Content is only revealed to certain levels of subscribers, so it's easier to monetize your system.

 makes it easier for developers to design DApps that are similar yet distinct. Developers can choose to contribute to a repository and make more logic codes available to future developers.

 is a new design meant to address issues with storage and gas fees. Network effects have been pricey, so CyberConnect has redesigned its system to require fewer gas fees and transactions.

To encourage community participation, CyberConnect runs 

, dividing their program into “seasons” that last a few months. Users who perform certain tasks, such as talking in the Discord chat or creating a 

CyberConnect represents the third version that the project’s team has unveiled. Earlier versions solved issues like storing user data and defining how the CyberProfile system would work. Now, V3 adds features such as ERC-4337 compatible infrastructure, censorship resistance and gas fee reductions.

The next step for CyberConnect is to finalize its structure, enact a decentralized autonomous organization (

) and solve any remaining bugs. The project is

. DApp developers and interested users can receive an invite to join the beta and help provide input for the development team to see how well CyberConnect functions. After ensuring that everything runs smoothly, the network’s team hopes to open up to the public and get more developers interested in building DApps for their system.

One of the key mechanics of this decentralized social protocol is 

 standard, CYBER tokens allow users to interact with different blockchains without having to purchase several different cryptos. You simply buy CYBER tokens and the network uses your account balance to pay for gas fees on any chain. CYBER is also a 

 you can use to interact with the DAO in the future.

There’s a total supply of 100 million CYBER tokens, to be released on a gradual schedule. The current circulating supply is around 11 million, and the total supply won't be available

When CYBER tokens were first released on Aug 15, 2023, the token’s price quickly soared to $6.99 as optimistic investors rushed to get involved with this promising project. Since then, prices have dropped a little as the market has stabilized. The current token price of CYBER is $4.01 (as of Aug 23, 2023). Since CYBER is still a relatively new crypto, no one is quite certain yet how it will behave. Increases in circulating supply and new announcements from the web3 social network could impact its price.

Many crypto experts forecast that prices will remain somewhat flat for the near future, and then undergo a slow yet steady increase in prices. For example, CoinWire 

 CYBER’s price will reach $6.05 by the end of 2023 and rise to $10.20 by 2025, followed by an increase to $15.54 in 2027 and $23.53 in 2030. Others, however, believe that the right market conditions could cause impressive price jumps. Data from DigitalCoinPrice 

 CYBER might reach $10.67 by the end of 2023 and advance to $17.64 by 2025. Moreover, CYBER is then expected to increase to $22.42 in 2027 and $50.54 in 2030.

One of CyberConnect's main backers is Binance Labs, so it's no surprise that they first listed their token on the Binance exchange. However, they're committed to making their web3 social network token highly accessible, so you can also buy the token from many other exchanges. For example, CYBER is available for sale on Bybit. With Bybit's convenient platform, buying CYBER is as simple as following these steps:

Since it was just recently launched, CYBER is still in the volatile post-release stage. It's currently one of the most hyped coins on the market, so it has the potential to provide an excellent return for short-term investors.

However, keep in mind that any new project should be approached with some caution. Though CYBER’s price doesn't seem likely to drop anytime soon, its long-term performance will heavily depend on whether the CyberConnect team delivers on its promises. Ultimately, the future looks bright for CYBER. It's a well-designed token with several uses, and the decentralized social network it's a part of is backed by a reputable team of developers and investors, such as Animoca Brands, Multicoin Capital, Delphi Digital, Polygon Studios and Tribe Capital.

CyberConnect hopes to provide a unique web3 social network. The project allows people to conveniently interact with a variety of DApps while still retaining complete ownership of their identity, data and creations. Whether you want to invest in a promising token or be an early adopter of the next web3 phenomenon, CyberConnect has a lot of potential.

CyberConnect (CYBER): Creating Lasting On-Chain Connections

Grab Up to 5,000 USDT in Rewards

Grab Up to 5,000 USDT in Rewards