Blockchain and AI are the most trending technologies. Blockchain for Finance and AI for Finance ventures are also increasing. The combination is hoped to fuel the autonomous financial infrastructure that will host all kinds of intelligent applications in capital and financial markets.

LiveTiles brought to my attention 20 AI Blockchain projects with a great infographic. As I have profiled a few of them in 2017 at the protocol layer and the data-finance verticals, I decided to catchup with Numerai. They had grabbed my attention 2 years ago in this primer I wrote: The Big Hairy Audacious Goal of Numerai: network effects in Quant trading

Numerai is creating a meta-model from all the Machine Learning (ML) algorithms developed by “the crowd” with cryptographic data. Numerai aims to offer a platform that generates alpha in a novel way. It wants to structure a rewarding mechanism for its traders that not only eliminates the typical competitive and adversarial behavior between them but actually, penalizes them.                              Efi Pylarinou

Numerai was and is a bleeding edge venture. It remains the only hedge fund built on blockchain and using ML and data science in a novel way. The novelty lies in changing the incentive and compensation structure of the fund manager.

Numerai launched no ICO. The NMR token was awarded to the thousands of data scientists for creating successful machine-learning based predictive models.  Once the data scientists are confident of the predictive ability of their model, they can stake their NMR and earn additional NMR if they are correct.

Numerai involves a staking mechanism.

In March, Numerai reported that $10million had been rewarded up to date. NMR tokens were distributed via airdrops initially. At launch on 21st February 2017, 1 million Numeraire tokens (NMR) were distributed to 12,000 anonymous scientists.  Thereafter, NMR  tokens were awarded as rewards to users of its platform. Bear in mind, that if a participant stakes NMR and their model doesn’t perform, the staked tokens are burnt.

According to Numerai, the NMR token is one of the most used ERC20 tokens. By end of 2018 reporting 25,000 stakes of NMR.

Source

Almost 200,000 models submitted by data scientists around the world for a competition to crowdsourced the best prediction models.

Source from Chris Burniske`s talk at Fluidity Summit in NYC.

Numerai in March raised $11mil from investors led by Paradigm and Placeholder VCs. Numerai is a very rare case because this fundraising is not for equity but for NMR tokens.

Numerai token is a utility token and investors just bought $11million of NMR tokens.

The funds raised will primarily be used to drive the development of Erasure, a decentralized predictions marketplace that Numerai launched.

What does this mean in plain worlds?

Numerai was not a protocol but rather an application  – a hedge fund. Erasure will transform it into a protocol. This has several significant implications.

• NMR becomes a token on the protocol and can be used to build all sorts of applications on top of Erasure.
• Numerai becomes decentralized. The NMR smart contract will no longer be controlled or upgraded by Numerai but by NMR token holders. So, NMR becomes a governance token.
• Numerai will have no authority on the supply of NMR tokens.

A protocol is born out of the app Numerai – its name is Erasure. Erasure is much broader than a hedge fund, as all sorts of prediction and data markets can be built on the protocol. The vision is to always to be a token that is actually used. Which brings to the spotlight the lack of transparency around data measuring use of protocol and Dapp tokens.

 Footnote: Numerai at launch was backed by Fred Ehrsam, Joey Krug, Juan Benet, Olaf Carlson-Wee and Union Square Ventures.

The Big Hairy Audacious Goal of @numerai : network effects in Quant trading https://t.co/LiMJu0gN9L by @efipm via @dailyfintech pic.twitter.com/l8vwRzt1Bf

— Efi Pylarinou (@efipm) June 6, 2017

Efi Pylarinou is the founder of Efi Pylarinou Advisory and a Fintech/Blockchain influencer.

I have no positions or commercial relationships with the companies or people mentioned. I am not receiving compensation for this post.

 Subscribe by email to join Fintech leaders who read our research daily to stay ahead of the curve. Check out our advisory services (how we pay for this free original research).