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

Bybit Institutional_Weekly Poster.png

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.

block-scholes-x-bybit-report.jpeg

Bybit X Block Scholes Crypto Derivatives Analytics Report (Jan 2, 2025): BTC Options Continue to See Call-Put Parity, With Lower Short-Term Volatility Expected

Dive into FLock, a decentralized platform that revolutionizes the way AI models are developed, trained and deployed.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is poised to transform countless industries, but its development often raises questions about privacy, control and inclusivity. 

 is a unique decentralized platform that democratizes AI training, fine-tuning and inferencing. With its blockchain-powered infrastructure, FLock ensures transparency, security and community-driven decision-making, paving the way for AI models that align with established societal values. 

In this article, we’ll explore how FLock decentralizes AI training, its key features and its potential impact on developers, communities and users.

 platform that revolutionizes the way AI models are developed, trained and deployed. By leveraging blockchain technology and a novel approach called 

, FLock addresses critical issues in AI development, such as centralized control, lack of transparency and privacy concerns.

At its core, FLock’s mission is to democratize AI by enabling communities to participate directly in the creation and refinement of AI models. Through federated learning, FLock trains AI models across multiple decentralized devices or servers. This method ensures that data remains local, eliminating the need for raw data exchange while still enabling robust model training. By decentralizing the training process, FLock not only protects individual privacy, but also fosters a more inclusive ecosystem in which diverse contributors can collaborate.

What sets FLock apart is its integration of 

. This ensures that all contributions — whether data, compute power or feedback — are transparently recorded and fairly rewarded. Blockchain tech’s immutable ledger enhances trust among participants and safeguards the process against manipulation. Additionally, the platform’s on-chain incentive mechanisms encourage participation from a wide range of contributors, ensuring that rewards are distributed equitably.

Ultimately, FLock empowers communities to develop bespoke AI models tailored to their specific needs. By decentralizing the process and prioritizing transparency and collaboration, FLock breaks the monopoly of large corporations, creating an AI ecosystem that aligns with public ethics and societal values.

, an Oxford alumnus with a robust background in AI and blockchain technology. Sun, who serves as FLock's CEO, has an impressive career trajectory, having worked as the Director of AI for the Royal Bank of Canada and as an AI Research Fellow at Imperial College London. His vision for FLock stems from a deep understanding of both the technical and ethical challenges of AI development.

The founding team also includes other Oxford alumni, boasting over a decade of combined experience in AI research and the cryptocurrency industry. This team brings a collective blend of academic excellence and practical expertise that positions FLock to lead the decentralized AI movement.

FLock has successfully raised $11 million in funding across two rounds, reflecting strong investor confidence in its vision. In May 2024, FLock secured a $6 million seed round co-led by Lightspeed Faction and Tagus Capital, with additional backing from Digital Currency Group (DCG), Volt Capital, OKX Ventures and Inception Capital.

Later, in December 2024, FLock announced a $3 million successful funding round led by DCG and joined by prominent names like Animoca Brands, Fenbushi Capital, GnosisVC and GSR. These investments are being channelled into enhancing the platform’s testnet and federated learning client, accelerating FLock’s mission of enabling secure, collaborative AI development.

With this funding and over 1,500 nodes contributing from platforms like Numerai and Kaggle, FLock is rapidly scaling its impact on decentralized AI training.

FLock AI revolutionizes AI development through its decentralized training framework. This approach allows participants to contribute to AI model training without ever sharing their personal data. Instead, models are trained locally across devices using federated learning, which ensures that data remains with its owners while still enhancing the accuracy of the model overall. 

FLock’s reward system is designed to incentivize active participation. Contributors who provide data, computational power and/or feedback are compensated with FLOCK tokens, ensuring a fair distribution of rewards. 

FLock empowers its community through a robust governance framework. Decisions regarding AI model development, deployment and ethical considerations are driven by the community, ensuring alignment with established societal values. Through blockchain-based voting mechanisms, contributors can influence the direction of AI projects, fostering transparency and public accountability. 

FLock’s modular architecture allows contributors to participate in specific aspects of AI model development. Whether providing raw data or computational power or even refining algorithms, the platform enables a collaborative and scalable development process. 

At the core of FLock’s philosophy is its commitment to privacy and security. By leveraging blockchain technology, the platform ensures that no single entity controls the AI development process. Data remains local and protected by cryptographic measures, while the immutability of blockchain guarantees transparency in every transaction and model update. 

 begins with a blockchain and an AI layer.

The blockchain layer underpins FLock’s incentivization and security mechanisms.

The AI layer facilitates model training, refinement and deployment, leveraging both centralized and federated approaches.

Let’s have a look at the supply and demand for the FLOCK token.

FLock adopts a 1:2 ratio model between team/investors (33.3%) and community (66.7%), prioritizing community-driven growth and ecosystem expansion. The majority of tokens are allocated to incentivize user participation and long-term ecosystem success.

FLock aims to improve the future of AI development by decentralizing the training process and ensuring transparency, privacy and inclusivity. By leveraging blockchain and federated learning, FLock empowers communities to contribute to AI creation without compromising on privacy. Its innovative reward system and community-driven governance foster a fair and collaborative ecosystem. 

With significant backing and a growing network of contributors, FLock is positioning itself as a leader in decentralized AI, offering a more ethical and secure alternative to traditional AI development models. As it continues to scale, FLock is set to transform the way AI models are built and deployed.

 — and earn a share of a 10 million FLOCK prize pool. For more details, visit 

Intermediate

flock.png

FLock AI: Decentralized AI Training

In this tutorial, we’ll explore how you can complete a series of tasks in Network3 for Bybit Web3 Airdrop Arcade.

Task 1: Register for a Network3 Account and Connect Your Bybit Wallet 

: Navigate to the campaign page and click on the 

task. Click on the task, and Galxe will ask to redirect you to the Network3 register page.

: Register for a Network3 account using your email address. You may indicate a 

Task 2: Download the Network3 App and Run a Node for One Hour

 and choose your operating system to download the Network3 app.

 or powerbutton, depending upon which operating system you’re using. For ease of reference, we’ve used macOS and iOS as examples below.

: Keep running the node until the timer reaches 

Beginner

network3 tutorial.png

How to Complete Network3 Tasks for Bybit Web3 Airdrop Arcade

Bybit Learn

DeFi

Trader Joe is a decentralized cryptocurrency exchange on the Avalanche blockchain that offers an extensive range of financial features. Find out more here.

, offering advantages such as faster transaction processing speed and significantly lower fees. Since Avalanche’s launch, it has supported an extensive range of decentralized cryptocurrency exchange projects. The most notable of these projects is Trader Joe, which has consistently developed new features since its debut in 2021, adding to its strong utility.

The Trader Joe platform currently offers an extensive range of services, such as a launchpad, an NFT marketplace, an exchange, and staking and lending. Trader Joe also features community governance. For each JOE token held, a user has one vote on issues like future improvements, strategies and more.

Trader Joe is the brainchild of longtime family friends 

, with the primary objective of simplifying and enhancing crypto users’ trading experiences. It offers a variety of services to achieve that important goal. Trading is accomplished through financial intermediaries, which offer necessary liquidity. Staking JOE tokens yields staking rewards, which are funded through trading fees. 

. Trader Joe also has a robust NFT marketplace that offers functions for auctions, safelists and displays. The Trader Joe team has created numerous tutorials so that users can easily take full advantage of the platform’s many features. In addition to being established on the Avalanche blockchain, Trader Joe supports BNB Chain and 

At the end of 2022, the Trader Joe team introduced the 

 to enhance capital efficiency, and reduce impermanent loss and slippage. The Liquidity Book works by accepting deposits from liquidity providers in various price bins. Each bin has a unique price, and liquidity providers can contribute to as many of the bins as they desire. When they provide liquidity, they receive fungible receipts. 

Through this improved system to provide liquidity, contributors can minimize risk while generating more rewards from Trader Joe fees. The Liquidity Book claims to improve capital efficiency by scaling up to 20,000 times higher.

The Trader Joe team is focused on setting the bar for investment activities on the Avalanche platform. It immediately offered utility to its users at launch, and its utility has expanded considerably with the introduction of new features and improvements made to established features. 

 is a fundamental feature of Trader Joe, supported through liquidity pools. The recent introduction of the Liquidity Book has bolstered capital efficiency, and the Trader Joe trading fee is 0.3% of each transaction. This low transaction fee is enabled because trades are completed on the AVAX blockchain. Of this fee, 0.25% is provided to the liquidity pools. The remaining 0.05% of the Trader Joe fee is allocated to the JOE token farm.

Prior to the launch of the Liquidity Book in November 2022, Trader Joe used a standard liquidity pool function to support trades. However, the team identified the need to improve capital efficiency, which led to the development of the Liquidity Book. Liquidity providers can make deposits to special bins, each of which has a different price, and they receive a fungible receipt for their deposits. This results in a greater return for liquidity providers, as well as reduced slippage and substantially greater capital efficiency since less liquidity is sitting idle in the liquidity pool. 

Users can also generate a return on Trader Joe through 

. Farmers lock their JOE tokens to be used for lending purposes and trading. 

 gives farmers access to bonus rewards and a portion of collected trading fees.

 JOE tokens takes place on the marketplace and produces sJOE or veJOE tokens. 

Those who contribute to the sJOE pool by staking JOE tokens can expect to receive a share of rewards from the pool in the form of a 

. Every swap completed on Trader Joe is charged a 0.05% fee. These fees are accumulated by Trader Joe and converted into stablecoins, to be distributed to the sJOE pool periodically every 24 hours.

On the other hand, contributing to the veJOE pool enables you to earn veJOE tokens that can be claimed. Doing so will apply a Boost APR feature to all Farms marked 

. This reward mechanism allows users to stake JOE to earn even more JOE tokens. The higher the amount you stake, the more rewards you receive. 

By staking JOE, users also contribute to essential functions. For example, holding veJOE tokens grants users voting rights for future platform governance.

Loans are available on Trader Joe through 

, which uses Compound Protocol’s lending mechanism to efficiently complete the loan process. An applicant’s borrowing limit is established by the value of their collateral. Thus, borrowers can increase their borrowing limit by simply increasing their collateral. As long as their current obligation has been satisfied, borrowers can remove tokens at their discretion. Banker Joe supports lending and borrowing using 

, AVAX and other tokens. Those who participate in lending activities may receive rewards paid in JOE tokens.

, the largest NFT marketplace on the Avalanche blockchain,. Users can search for NFTs that suit their interests by using a filtering function. Artists can take advantage of a support website. Those who wish to sell their NFTs have access to safelists, auction settings and display tools.

After officially launching on the Avalanche blockchain in 2021, Trader Joe quickly gained traction and now has several million active users. The Trader Joe team has progressively expanded to improve the platform’s utility. While its 

, Trader Joe today holds its status as the Avalanche project with the highest transaction volume. 

The platform’s important Liquidity Book update was released at the end of 2022 to optimize capital efficiency, and 

, Liquidity Book V2.1, is upcoming. The team has also bridged to BNB Chain and Arbitrum in order to capture new user bases, and staking is now available on these networks as well.

JOE is the native token that powers the Trader Joe platform. JOE tokens are used for community governance, granting one vote per JOE token. In addition, Trader Joe fees are paid in JOE tokens, as are rewards for staking. The total supply of JOE is 500 million tokens, and there are more than 345 million tokens in circulation. The 

n allocates 50% to liquidity providers, 20% to the treasury, 20% to the development team and 10% to future investors.

The current price of JOE as of Apr 17, 2023 is $0.6538. The price has surged dramatically over the last couple of weeks, and was valued at $0.187 on Mar 12. The current market cap is $226 million, and the 24-hour trading volume has surpassed $26 million. 

 may continue its upward trajectory in the years to come, though it may close 2023 with a dip. Its experts project a price of $0.35 at year-end. This may increase to $0.79 in 2025 and $1.73 in 2027, and by 2030, JOE may be valued at $5.29.

 are more bullish, suggesting that JOE will close 2023 at $1.29. JOE’s price is then expected to increase to $2.07 in 2025, $2.64 in 2027 and $6.11 in 2030. 

JOE tokens can be purchased on several cryptocurrency exchanges, including Bybit. You can trade JOE tokens in the form of perpetual contracts. After you’ve established a Bybit account and funded it with cryptocurrency, you may proceed to navigate to the 

Established on the Avalanche blockchain, the Trader Joe token’s utility and benefits are strongly tied to the success of its blockchain. Trader Joe has exceptional features that may be difficult for other platforms to mimic, and this supports the platform’s lasting dominance on AVAX. For this reason, and because the team and community continue to identify new opportunities for growth and improvement, the popularity of Trader Joe may continue to expand in the years to come.

Anticipation and belief in its projected growth are displayed via the positive price predictions for JOE tokens. Whether you hold JOE for long-term gains from price growth or use your tokens for rewards from staking, lending and more, JOE may prove to be a lucrative investment. That said, always do your own research and evaluate your own risk appetite before investing.

The Trader Joe token’s utility and low fees are two of the reasons why this platform has gained popularity quickly since its launch. As the project continues to evolve through various updates, it may remain a leading platform on Avalanche with continued growth in both its user base and the price of JOE.

Trader Joe (JOE): Zero Slippage Trades With Its Liquidity Book AMM

Grab Up to 5,000 USDT in Rewards

Grab Up to 5,000 USDT in Rewards