By
Steve Muchoki
April 16th, 2024
Numeraire smart contract was deployed to Ethereum and 1.2 million tokens were released to data scientists around the world.
Richard Craib used his belief that tech’s machine learning experts may be better stock pickers than those with finance backgrounds and launched Numerai, a crowdsourced hedge fund. Craib aimed to attract the world’s best and brightest minds from companies like Google and leverage their AI skills.
Numerai focuses on the creation of its own financial model that incorporates the algorithms submitted by others. All the data is readily accessible although still encrypted and not shareable. Users can download the data and develop their own algorithm, targeting regions or sectors of the stock market.
The first year already was a success. Over 7,500 “data scientists” created algorithms on Numerai’s platform with most of the participants being from the U.S., Russia or China.
Participants don’t get income from the hedge fund directly, but the most accurate submission gets awarded about $60,000 in income per year. Craib explained that they worked with bitcoin to respect their users’ right for anonymity. Due to this anonymity, he underlined that they didn’t know whether some of the entrants were doing something that violates the protocols set by their employers.
In February, Numerai released Numeraire, a cryptographic token to encourage data scientists to contribute artificial intelligence to the hedge fund.
Numeraire live on Ethereum
Today, Numeraire becomes available on Ethereum with more than 1.2 million tokens been sent to 19,000 data scientists around the world.
Numerai team says that bitcoin exists on the blockchain different to the Numeraire token. This drastically limits the extent to which decentralized applications based on Numerai can be automated. Bitcoin is convenient for individuals but not for decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs).
Making Numerai available on Ethereum means many benefits for the fund. It is known that bitcoin will be phased out of Numerai by September 30th. This will be a pivot point when all payments will flip into ether and Numeraire.
Data scientists now can withdraw Numeraire tokens to any Ethereum address and use Numeraire to earn more money by staking it on their predictions.
“The staking mechanism creates a powerful new incentive to build the best machine learning model on Numerai. For thousands of people, staking Numeraire will be the first time in their lives they have interacted with an Ethereum smart contract. And they can do it all from Numerai’s website without needing to manage keys or use an Ethereum client”, says Numerai.
And this is not speculative. Users can stake Numeraire right now, and the Ethereum transaction will influence the course of Numerai’s hedge fund.
One more crowdsale of blockchain-based lottery TrueFlip is scheduled for June 28th. The company is planning to issue 21,000,000 TFL tokens. 80% of tokens will be offered during the crowdsale while the remaining 20% will be released as rewards for the team. Totally, TrueFlip targets to raise 1,000 BTC intended for technical and marketing purposes.