ASK ME ANYTHING
Tags: Algorithms, Cryptography, Ama, Blockchain

As AlphaNu is doing the listing on Bitforex, discussions in community chatrooms continues to rise, our team looks forward to discussing our long-awaited project everyone again. This time, we were honored to be on Gagarin’s Telegram channel for a hour of uninterrupted questions and answers.

( AlphaNu Team: CEO- Paul Hsu, CTO- MING YANG CHIH)

The top 10 questions from the AMA are as follows:

(Note: This AMA has been edited for clarity.)

1. Tell us more about you, your work, position, daily routine in AlphaNu

I’ve been working in hedge fund industry for 20 years now in various roles including analyst and portfolio manager. I founded a quant hedge fund in 2013 called THM Capital. We later founded AlphaNu to take advantage of the large China market. My position at AlphaNu is CEO and my daily routines include meeting with our partners and also working on the backend systems for our marketplace platform.

2. We all will love to know bit more about you, your background, and how your daily work in AlphaNu looks like

I’m MingYang from Taiwan. I work in cryptography and blockchain applications for over 10 years now. I was CTO of various projects leading teams from product design to production. AlphaNu will be the best product of all the products I’ve worked on. We are developing the system now and the beta is almost ready. We also work with public chains and integrate our systems with them.

3. Can you tell, who are your main competitors and what are your main advantages?

Our main competitors are Chinese chat forums where amateur developers sell trading signals and algorithms. However, most these algorithms perform poorly over time because the Chinese developers are from an engineering background with no financial market experience. Our advantage over them is the algorithms in our marketplace are created by Wall Street developers with years and years of trading experience. That experience is paramount to developing successful algorithms that works.

We don’t see any other blockchain projects as our competitor. Other projects doing similar algorithm trading is focused on the crypto market. In comparison, we’re focused on the traditional financial markets of commodities and stocks and those are a lot harder to enter because of entrenched relationships, which we have from our years of operating as a quant hedge fund.

4. Is it investment advice or something? Why not just to stake ETH instead of your planning token?

Our platform is closely tied with the use of blockchain-based tokens as a transparent and automated pricing mechanism. It adjusts according to the amount of interest, attention and network value in the use of the marketplace, as there is more tokens required to be staked.

Some examples:

- Each listing on the marketplace for our algorithms requires a token stake

- Every month, developers have to repeatedly stake for access to the processed data on the platform

- ANU tokens are necessary to generate a revenue contract (more details in our whitepaper https://bit.ly/2LujAUo

5. Can you explain use case of your token in a simple example?

Revenue Contracts are offerings integrated into the AlphaNu platform, which allow developers to monetize the future revenue of their algorithms up-front. It allows them to convert up to 50% of the future revenue they would earn from the algorithm listing into a revenue contract, and sell fractionalized portions of this contract to potential investors or buyers who believe in the sales potential of the algorithm.

This mechanism allows developers to get a one-time lump sum payment, which may be a more attractive option to them than subscription-based payments. More importantly, it enables third parties to become stakeholders in the equation — these stakeholders are then incentivized to promote, market, and effectively resell the algorithm on the developer’s behalf, as they earn from any sales made of that algorithm.

Our goal in creating Revenue Contracts is to create an ambassadorship or affiliate model which is aligned with the needs of AlphaNu’s marketplace. Because Revenue Contracts are executed on the blockchain and visible to the public, we build a layer of trust on top of our affiliate model that contract buyers can refer to at any point they want to support an algorithm with existing issued contracts.

The added transparency from this mechanism also helps in dispute settlements; as all transactions are logged and executed on the blockchain, we maintain a paper trail of revenue rights and ownership that can easily be used to prove attribution.

6. Why do you arrange IEO without working product?

Our system already runs specific funds to help them to decide their trading strategies. Actually, AlphaNu’s platform is in beta stage and we will release in our developer community.

7. Are you going to launch your platform both for crypto market and stock/forex market?

We are only allow in the commodity and stock market for now. Maybe in the next stage we will consider crypto.

8. When your platform will generate profits? What is the business model? Can people lease their tokens (like LTO lease) and receive passive rewards for confirming the transactions?

The business model is a marketplace to buy and sell trading algorithms. Think Amazon marketplace, but for trading algo. Our goal is to build the best marketplace technology out there in order to bring Wall Street trading algorithms to the masses to democratize the playing field.

9. How do you feel about the future of algorithmic trading industry ?

Algo trading is taking over the world. 80~90% of US and European trading volume is done by computer algos. However, in China, that % is only about 5%. so there is TREMENDOUS growth for algo trading in China and rest of Asia in the next 5~10 years as Asia catches up.

10. AlphaNu planning to expand worldwide? Or focus on China for how long?

Our goal is to become the biggest marketplace for trading algorithms in Asia, home to the world’s fastest growing financial markets. We will start in China, which is currently the home of the largest commodities exchanges in the world. After China, we will be entering other countries in the region such as Japan, Korea, and SE Asia