Jan 6, 2025: Our weekly Institutional Insights explores the latest market developments — market performance, industry news, exchange-traded fund (ETF) flows, trending topics, upcoming events and token unlocks — to help you supercharge your crypto trading.

Weekly Highlight — Markets Snap Five-Day Loss Streak 

Investors are now seizing the opportunity to buy the dip in U.S. stocks after a five-day decline that erased over $1 trillion in market value. Wall Street has broken its longest losing streak since April, with the Nasdaq-100 rebounding 1.7% and the S&P 500 rising 1.3% on Friday, January 3. These gains slightly offset the week's sell-off, which had continued into the new year following a tough December.

Despite concerns about slowing earnings growth among tech giants like the Magnificent Seven, traders remain optimistic, especially regarding AI leader NVIDIA Corporation. The market believes that, as long as retail investors keep investing in AI, the associated stock market boom is expected to persist. 

Stocks reached their session highs in the afternoon after Mike Johnson was reelected as speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, indicating potential support for a business-friendly agenda. Meanwhile, bond yields rose, with the 10-year hitting 4.6% following comments from Richmond Fed President Tom Barkin about maintaining restrictive rates. U.S. manufacturing showed modest growth, with new orders at their highest since early last year, while investors assessed economic strength against the possibility of slower interest-rate cuts.

Weekly Crypto Highlight — AI Agent Spring Coming

Many investors are eagerly anticipating an Alt Season, a period when altcoins typically surge in value. However, current market dynamics suggest we may not see a widespread altcoin rally. The sheer number of tokens, combined with limited liquidity, has led to what's known as altcoin dispersion, making it crucial to select the right sectors and tokens.

, which are thriving even as the broader market declines. This nascent sector is experiencing rapid advancements, and its associated tokens face less pressure from venture capital unlocks. Many of its top protocols lack centralized exchange listings, indicating more buyers may enter the market.

Those investors who missed previous opportunities, such as the DeFi summer of 2020 and the Alt Layer 1 trade, now have another chance. Instead of targeting individual AI agents, the best risk/reward strategy lies in investing in infrastructure plays, which serve as the foundational tools for the sector.

The leading AI agent player is Virtuals Protocol, a platform for launching tokenized AI agents on the Base network. By purchasing tokens like Luna by Virtuals (LUNA) and VaderAI (VADER), users gain governance rights over specific agents, which allows them to both influence development and share in profits. 

Recently, daily protocol fee revenues dropped significantly in mid-December 2024 as activity slowed for the holidays. However, speculation around agent-associated tokens surged as the new year approached. Currently, Virtuals Protocol generates over $1 million in daily fees, though this is 50% less than figures for early December. Despite these challenges, the VIRTUAL token has more than doubled in value, reaching a market capitalization of $4.6 billion.

Other highlighted opportunities include Zerebro, which is pivoting to a full-stack framework for AI agents; ARC, with its Rust-based framework; and 

 (GRIFFAIN), a natural language on-chain search tool. These projects are well-positioned for future growth in the evolving landscape of AI technology.

 as we delve into leading AI agent tokens and the past week’s market movements. 

Advanced

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Weekly Institutional Insights: Market Snaps Five-Day Loss Streak; AI Agent Spring Coming

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.

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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 Learn

Altcoins

XCAD Network is a blockchain-based platform whose fans receive creator token rewards by watching their favorite creators directly on YouTube. Learn more here.

As the crypto community grows larger, more crypto projects are also coming up with ways to entice users to use their products, such as “x-to-earn,” in which users complete an action to earn free crypto. One of the most popular concepts, of which XCAD Network is the pioneer, is Watch2Earn. In the following detailed guide, we’ll cover everything you need to know about this revolutionary project.

As a creator, you can issue your own unique tokens, which fans can buy, hold or trade. By tokenizing YouTube performance metrics, XCAD Network incentivizes high-quality content creation and fosters more equitable and 

. In this way, creators have greater control over monetization, and fans can actively participate in the success of their favorite creators.

As a devoted fan, you can use the XCAD browser extension to earn creators' tokens while watching your favorite content on YouTube. The extension allows fans to earn, 

, view and trade these tokens seamlessly through the plugin, which operates in the background as you watch videos.

Fans receive a creator's tokens after they’ve watched at least 80% of the creator’s video. You can use these 

 to participate in polls set up by your favorite creators, with the number of tokens you hold determining the weight of your vote. This system ensures that a creator's most devoted fans have the greatest influence on their content.

Besides voting, it's possible to trade tokens for other creators' tokens, purchase merchandise, acquire NFTs and participate in various other activities.

XCAD Network is the brainchild of Oliver Bell (CEO), Joel Morris and Bernice Thomas (CTO). The company was founded in 2019 in the United Kingdom, and the 

To bring their vision to life, the founders assembled a team of experts in blockchain technology, digital marketing and business development. The founding members’ extensive backgrounds in blockchain technology and digital marketing have contributed to the mainstream adoption of the XCAD Network platform. 

It was during this period that well-known YouTubers like MrBeast and KSI backed the project, lending credibility and visibility to the XCAD Network. MrBeast (whose real name is Jimmy Donaldson) is an American YouTuber known for his philanthropic activities, large-scale stunts and extravagant challenges. KSI, or Olajide Olayinka Williams "JJ" Olatunji, is a British YouTuber, rapper, actor and boxer who gained fame through his gaming and comedy content. 

The XCAD Network governance token was introduced in 2021 as an ERC-20 token on the Ethereum network. It later expanded to include 

, and has since extended its presence to other blockchains such as 

The project continues to evolve, aiming to disrupt the traditional social media landscape and create a more rewarding experience for creators and their fans.

By leveraging blockchain technology, XCAD Network tries to solve several challenges faced by creators and audiences in the traditional social media landscape. Here's how it has transformed the traditional landscape:

, creator tokens are unique digital assets that represent a content creator's brand. The value of these tokens and creator tokenization are typically influenced by factors such as a creator's popularity, content quality and audience engagement.

The XCAD ecosystem is built around the use of tokenized analytics. Fans can also invest in creators based on their metrics, providing an additional layer of monetization and incentivizing creators to produce high-quality content.

The XCAD ecosystem consists of various decentralized applications (

) that enhance and contribute to the overall value of the creator token ecosystem, offering a robust and interconnected experience for users. Following is a list of its main components.

XCAD Network partners with hundreds of influencers. The 

 is a platform that tracks and analyzes the value of creator tokens so users can easily track the impact of an individual influencer and buy tokens accordingly.

 is the XCAD Network’s decentralized exchange and it enables users to effortlessly 

 allows users to vote on decisions related to the XCAD Network and determines which creators can issue their tokens. Using the portal, you can also have an impact on the decisions of your preferred creators by participating in polls.

The XCAD Network platform includes a decentralized NFT marketplace where creators can mint, sell and trade unique digital collectibles. Fans will be able to purchase these NFTs, which represent digital art, memorabilia or other items related to a creator's brand, to further support the creator and engage with their content. While the NFT Marketplace cannot be accessed at the moment, the XCAD Network website states that this feature will be available soon.

 that integrates with YouTube, allowing fans to earn creator token rewards while watching videos.

 (Creator Liquidity Offerings) is an integral part of the XCAD ecosystem that’s designed to raise funds for a creator's initial liquidity. It functions similarly to a conventional launchpad, but rather than providing funds directly to the creator, the collected funds are locked as liquidity, effectively reducing the number of XCAD tokens in circulation.

There’s a significant engagement gap between YouTube content creators and their fans, with no rewards for continued loyalty or opportunities for devoted fans to get to know their favorite creators. XCAD narrows this gap by fostering a mutually advantageous relationship between creators and their fans.

XCAD Network has already achieved several milestones in its journey toward revolutionizing content creation and fan engagement. Following is a summary of the prominent milestones and plans.

XCAD token is the native digital asset of the XCAD Network, and serves various purposes within the platform's ecosystem. As an integral component of the XCAD Network, the token enables a range of functions, 

The maximum supply of XCAD tokens is limited to 200 million. The following is an overview of its distribution:

As of Apr 4, 2023, the current price of XCAD is $1.64. Despite recent setbacks, experts are upbeat about the future of the XCAD token, primarily due to its utility and unique value proposition. 

 suggest that XCAD could close the year at $2.26, almost double to $4.89 by 2025 and surpass the $15 mark by 2028. In 2030, PricePrediction believes XCAD’s price will hit $32.22. 

 are more bullish in the short term than those at PricePrediction. XCAD’s price is predicted to rise to $4.20 by the end of 2023 and continue increasing to $6.95 by 2025. By 2028, its growth will slow down and reach $10.42. In 2030, XCAD’s price will double to reach $20.10.

Of course, while price predictions by experts suggest that XCAD shows promising growth, these forecasts should be taken with a pinch of salt as cryptocurrencies are known to be highly volatile. As such, we recommend that you do your own research before investing in any cryptocurrency. 

XCAD crypto that can be purchased on various platforms, including Bybit. To get started trading XCAD on Bybit, simply sign up for a Bybit account and fund it with cryptocurrency. Then, you can navigate to the 

To celebrate the recent listing of the XCAD/USDT pair, Bybit has prepared 

 with a total prize pool of 60,000 XCAD for you to participate in.

XCAD targets content creators and their audiences, enabling tokenized social engagement and monetization. This distinct use case has garnered attention and interest in the project.

Over time, XCAD Network has also managed to foster a dedicated community of supporters, which helps spread the word and drive adoption. Similarly, a strong team and new platform integrations are signs of a progressive framework.

These and other contributing factors bode well for the future of this project. Amid the growth, this is perhaps the best time to buy the token before it reaches maturity. 

The demand for decentralized solutions and tokenized social engagement has increased in recent years. XCAD Network's focus on addressing this demand has contributed to its success.

In the long term, the success of the XCAD project will depend on its ability to continue delivering value, maintain strong partnerships and adapt to changes in the market and regulatory environment.

XCAD Network (XCAD): Pioneering the Watch2Earn Revolution

Grab Up to 5,000 USDT in Rewards

Grab Up to 5,000 USDT in Rewards