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

Blockchain

Songbird is the canary network for the Flare blockchain, a smart contract platform designed to enhance cross-chain interoperability/

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Cross-chain interoperability remains a challenge for the wider adoption of blockchain technology. By default, blockchains are self-contained environments that have limited points of contact with the outside world. Many projects have been launched in recent years to improve blockchains’ ability to communicate with each other. One of the upcoming projects in this domain is 

 (FLR). This new blockchain takes pretesting seriously, with a test chain, Songbird (SGB), at the core of its launch activities.

In blockchain, a canary network is a pretesting environment used to safely test features and functions to be implemented. A canary network is a proper chain of its own, and emulates most or all the features of the main blockchain it’s designed to test. It has exactly the same network architecture as the main chain.

Canary networks are usually different from 

 chains, used in pretesting a final blockchain, (the mainnet). Testnets nearly always have the same native coin as their mainnets, while canary networks feature a different cryptocurrency. Additionally, crypto coins and tokens on a testnet have no monetary value, and can be freely spent. In contrast, canary networks feature proper coins and tokens with some market value. The coin and token balances on a canary network cannot be freely replenished.

As such, a canary network might be considered a more advanced network type than a testnet. In some cases, canary networks continue to operate for years alongside their main chain, and might even develop defined ecosystems of their own.

Songbird is the canary network for the Flare blockchain, a 

 platform designed to enhance cross-chain interoperability that’s compatible with the 

 (EVM), opening up opportunities for interaction with a large number of modern blockchains.

Originally, Flare was conceptualized to help improve compatibility between the 

 and other popular public blockchains. The XRP Ledger is the enterprise-oriented blockchain of leading crypto financial network 

, whose coin, XRP, is the 7th largest cryptocurrency by market cap.

Top 7 Cryptocurrencies by Market Cap as of November 21, 2022

By connecting the XRP Ledger to other prominent blockchains, Flare can help markedly improve the business world’s overall adoption of blockchain technology.

As of November 2022, Flare is in “observation mode,” with its beta version expected to be launched shortly.

’s (DOT) thorough adoption of pretesting via its own canary network, 

 (KSM), the developers of Flare are using Songbird as a testing network to implement all the key features of Flare: Flare Time Series Oracle (FTSO), State Connector and F-Assets. This means that Songbird would always be a step ahead of Flare in terms of technological innovations, albeit with the added risk of instability.

 that feeds external price-pair data into Flare’s blockchain. 

 is a Flare functionality to securely pass off-chain data on the network. 

 are special assets designed to enable smart contract functionality on Flare using cryptocurrencies that don’t normally support such a feature. Examples of these cryptocurrencies would be XRP, as well as popular coins based on the 

 (PoW) consensus protocol such as Bitcoin (BTC), Dogecoin (DOGE) and Litecoin (LTC).

SGB is Songbird’s native crypto coin. One of its key functions is governance. SGB is crucial for testing governance-led functionalities of the Flare ecosystem. Flare governance proposals may 

 — the Flare Foundation (a Netherlands-based nonprofit in charge of the project), and the user community. If a proposal comes from the Foundation, it’s voted on directly on the Flare network.

However, if the user community submits a proposal, it first has to go through the voting process on Songbird, with SGB coin holders making a decision. If the vote is successful, the proposal will move to the next stage, voting and consideration on Flare. Changes proposed by the user community via voting on Songbird concern the actual Flare blockchain, not Songbird directly. If the changes are implemented on Flare, they’ll be duplicated on Songbird for testing purposes.

Besides governance, SGB can also be used within the key apps and services on Songbird — FTSO, State Connector and F-Asset systems — as a testing ground. This way, users who wish to use Flare network can first try out the services without risking their FLR coins while earning SGB coins. For example, oracle data providers in FTSO earn rewards for their activity. SGB holders may also delegate coins to their chosen data providers to improve their voting power, and to earn a share of the rewards paid to them.

In September 2021, SGB started with a supply of 15 billion at an annual inflation of 10%. There are now 16.7 billion coins, 8.7 billion of which are in circulation. The coin has been airdropped to XRP holders via various exchanges at a rate of 0.1511 SGB:1 XRP.

SGB initially traded at around $0.31. In its first three months, its value fluctuated between $0.35 and $0.65. In late 2021, a long-term downward trend began, carrying it to $0.02 by May 2022 and around $0.01 by October. SGB has been relatively stable since then, trading at $0.013 as of November 21, 2022.

 that SGB’s price will reach $0.036 by 2025 and $0.043 by 2027. 

, expecting it to trade at $0.041 by 2025 and $0.085 by 2027. Thus, leading forecasters predict a slow, modest long-term growth pattern for SGB.

Our view is that SGB does have potential for modest-to-good growth. Its network acts as a testing environment for a project that has great potential to bring enterprise-focused XRP to the wider blockchain ecosystem. Its useful functionality to enable smart contract operations for mineable cryptos — BTC, LTC and DOGE — may also provide further support to SGB.

However, the testing/canary nature of Songbird may act as a risk factor for SGB’s growth potential. Canary networks do function as full blockchains for years on end. However, if Songbird is largely deprioritized when Flare is in full operation, SGB’s growth potential would then be curtailed.

Songbird’s fate will largely depend on what kind of canary network it develops into over time. It might fade into obscurity when advanced testing is completed, and the Flare ecosystem is in full swing. However, as with Kusama/Polkadot, Songbird might continue to flourish and develop its own unique and rich ecosystem, independent of Flare. If Flare’s project team keeps an eye on the Kusama/Polkadot environment, they might see the benefits of actively supporting Songbird as its own long-term network.

Songbird Crypto: The Canary Network for Flare

Grab Up to 5,000 USDT in Rewards

Grab Up to 5,000 USDT in Rewards