By Uri Inspector, Staff Reporter
Analytics specialist Santiment has made its new SANbase cryptocurrency analysis platform available to data scientists, analysts and researchers at financial services firms in a bid to tap into their shared observations and predictions.
Santiment recently ran its first public ‘hackathon’, allowing a range of users – from institutional analysts to retail traders – direct access to the open-sourced big data analytics platform through an API, allowing them to share their analysis of the crypto space and expanding the SANbase data network.
Santiment provides crypto-asset focused market research, customised to a range of different model-based trading methodologies, including algorithmic, AI-based, and quant trading. SANbase is a next-generation platform that provides insights from cryptocurrency market data.
According to Santiment founder and CEO Maksim Balashevich, “The power of the ‘expert crowd’ is what we are aiming toward. As this one first experience with ‘hackathon’ showed, they were able to create pretty amazing results in three days. One group made a prototype of a predictive model for the ETH [Ethereum] price, based on our collection of the social data. Others made discoveries on token holders, just to give two examples.”
He adds “It’s important to understand why this was possible in such a short time. We are giving them prepared data (typically 80% of the work flows into it), experience of what this data means and a deep understanding of how crypto is working right now.”
SANbase provides a real-time view of crypto market dynamics, including daily active addresses, github activity and Santiment’s ‘token aging velocity’ metric. SANbase also includes data on all Ethereum blockchain-based or ‘ERC-20’, assets, which Santiment claims to be unique among data analytics firms in the crypto space. Other metrics include on-chain data, as well as information sourced from live market data feeds, media, crypto asset developers, data professionals, and the open-source and trading communities.
Santiment has promised ‘economic rewards’ to incentivise data experts who contribute their analysis, with the aim of tapping into crypto expertise that is hard to find outside of hedge funds. “[Users] also get access to the rare expertise we have built over the years,” says Balashevich. “Typically, it’s not possible to find it.
“Later on, if they continue and build the working prototype of predictive models or algorithms, we could offer them a more direct reward,” he adds. “Then, after their results are published and shared on the platform, they will be rewarded by the community, as the power of the free P2P market kicks in.”
As the cryptocurrency market remains saturated with asymmetric information, poor liquidity and constant volatility, Santiment reckons the SANbase platform is the first in the market to make aggregated expert crypto data widely available, seeking to create predictive models and findings that reduce wild speculation and instill more rationality in a market driven by sentiment.
“We aren’t really fixing liquidity, at least not directly,” says Balashevich. “Rather, we want to bring efficiency and transparency. Every researcher who has skills and dedication deserves the right to show as soon as possible his potential and benefit from it in a P2P way.” Decentralising high-quality market information, Balashevich’s goal is also to tackle scammers spreading FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt), those who leverage market sentiment to manipulate prices, and so-called ‘pumpers and dumpers’, and prevent paid shills from destabilising the crypto space.
While he admits that it may take longer for experts to make sense of crypto than it may have for more established markets, Blashevich expresses a strong belief that “the public community of experts will be able to make much more sense of crypto. Especially if they are driven – and protected by proper system design – only by greed for the quality of data, not profit.” He adds: “This is the main goal of Santiment – to build the highest-quality network. Nothing is being done for the sake of fast profit. Long-term reputation for the platform participants is being built in the core.”
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