I did a high level design of this application a few months ago with the intention of building it out. Unfortunately, I became too busy with personal life and other business ventures. Rather than holding onto it, I would love to see this platform being built, even if I didn't build it myself, as I think it will bring transparency and force integrity in the promotion of projects/tokens (yes I did just use those synonymously).

Finally, I think it is an application that truly benefits from a blockchain over a database. Good luck with taking on this project, I will be keeping an eye out for it.
P.s. The name Trackies is for fun, whereby we would track calls made by investors whilst a play on the Australian phrase of referring to tracksuits as trackies. Comment below if you want me to answer any follow up questions

Trackies – Investment calls on the blockchain

Like a twitter for advisors (leaders) to announce their trades and have their work rewarded by having investors (mates) follow them.

This platform aims to solve the problem of crypto transparency in trading. If you make a call on a token/cryptocurrency, it is recorded to the blockchain to allow potential investors to honestly monitor the performance of your portfolio. The token will be used to gain access to trading leaders calls, crypto information and current breakdown of their portfolio.

The future is, "check it on the blockchain", a future where you can't just promote your good calls and hide the bad ones.

As it works today, only regulatory bodies with finite resources, capped by the limits of the sovereign nation and its laws and the rigor of human intervention keep investment advisors honest. Worse, as we move to an international market, YouTubers, Twitter personalities and bloggers can steal the attention of investors, make multiple calls and sing to the mountain when some of these calls are correct, hide in the noise the calls that went belly up.

A centralised service that tracks portfolio performance can be corrupted and manipulated by big players, institutions and the hosting company. It could be hacked, attacked and bought down my malicious third parties. We never really know what the true state of the ledger looks like, locked behind firewalls and held in single institution databases. This lack of transparency hurts the integrity of any centralised system that wants to support the promotion and trust of good investors, offering real value and sustained performance of leaders.

The use of a blockchain for this application dominates its database peers by offering transparency, integrity, immutability, security and all without a single intermediary. The token has value instantly and the market for such a service already exists. Acknowledging that blockchain is less programmatically, read/write and update efficient than it's database peers, it seems quite obvious that this application gets more benefit from using a blockchain.

How will it work - high level

Portfolio performance: it all comes down to idea of a portfolio. I have zero balance, I make a call to buy x number of token y on this date. Tracked against an average of the major exchanges, if my token goes up by z% my track is up some %. If my token goes down z% my track is down some %.

• The user logins and creates an account. One account can be both a leader or mate.
• They look at the 'leaderboard' or search to find 'leaders'. Leader board can be expanded from the default top 20 leaders to up to 100 per page. The information provided before clicking on the profile include: number of mates, portfolio performance represented as either BTC/USD % gain, name, profile pic, possibly an approval rating based on the average of the scores of set metrics mates can leave feedback on.
• When they click on a leader they see a dashboard with the following information:
  • SEE notes titled "Metrics to be displayed"
• Follow a leader by loading their wallet and paying the leaders fee. The token has instant value by providing the payment method between mates and leaders
• The investors registers a call/transaction. Set criteria i.e. name of token/currency, time/date, amount. It's registered this to the blockchain, hence creating the start of their portfolio. OR create a trial portfolio, which isn't registered to the blockchain but let's them learn to use the system. This information is NOT publicly available
• Mates have the ability to filter leaders by time periods (i.e. what was the top broker during the dips), filter by crypto assets classes (product vs platform vs currency), individual coins, a collection of coins you've deemed of interest.

Metrics to be displayed to the users (BEFORE they follow)

1. How many calls have I made?
2. Number of Mates (followers)
3. How many tokens have I diversified in? Shades of grey pie chart.
4. When was my last call?
5. How frequent are my calls?
6. Approval rating score
7. Performance over time

Additional metrics to be displayed to the users (AFTER THEY FOLLOW)

1. Portfolio performance breakdown (the previous shades of grey pie chart showing diversification now comes alive with colours showing each token and it's %).
2. Any information shared (TBD- this might be priced separately)
3. Activity log of past calls
4. All future calls
5. More granular rating score - frequency, level of detail/sophistication, presenting them in any easy fashion or not.

What problems are we solving?

1. A public ledger free of investment conflicts, free of manipulation or corruption. Border less without the need for a single jurisdiction regulator

2. Honest comparison of portfolio performance of advisers

3. Transparency, anti-manipulation, anti-corruption, can't be shut down, international and owner less.

Questions about building a blockchain application I still need to understand

1. What are the pros/cons of the potential consensus algorithms? Which metrics do you use to determine which consensus algorithms to use.

2. Which blockchain to build on? What's the benefit of each? Which metrics are important? (community, transaction speed, security, network, future developers plans?)

3. How do most of people with an idea go about building their first blockchain project? Are you all doing it by yourself? Have you raised capital to put together a team? Have you got at third party development team?

4. How do you test? Obviously using a testnet, but do the same developers do the testing or have you hired a third party?

5. How does the order of importance building a blockchain application differ from a standard webapp? i.e. do you need to have the front end webapp designs, then marry that to a data structure and pitch it all together?

6. How do we work with a wallet or other existing wallets? Obviously this depends on the blockchain you develop on, ERC20?

7. How does the token sale actually work? It is manual? Do they just transfer and leave an address?

8. How to create the software for people to act as nodes? This is separate to the application code right? This is the protocol that dictates everything

9. How and what data do we store where? Obviously there's a transaction fee to respect on the blockchain networks, so you don't want to store everything, how do you determine what needs to be on the blockchain? Just what needs to be immutable, transparent, censorship resistant etc etc. Does the rest just get stored on IPFS and CDNs?

10. How does identity work on the blockchain - who verifies that you are who you say you are? How do we stop sybil attacks? If you don't know who the user is, how do you stop people signing up for multiple accounts and interacting with one another to game the system?

11. Account vs private keys - security vs convenience? How do you decide?

12. Do you have to create a blockchain before you can do an ico? If not, how does it work? How can you distribute tokens without an existing blockchain?

13. How do you set the gas amount to be paid per write to the blockchain? How do you scale that with the blockchain transactions?

What gets stored on the blockchain?

The call and all of it's components, including:

• Type - buy/sell
• Token/currency
• Date/time of the call commit
• Increment of the call to the total number of calls
• Total number of calls per person
• Code

Token related questions

• How many?
• Burn vs movement
• How many do we keep ourselves
• How many do we keep and distribute?
• How does the time locked contracts work for ensuring trust to investors that developers won't 100% of the token and run off

Questions about the platform/business

1. How do we want to do ICO/fundraising

2. ICO or capital raising - 25% held by the team, 50% development, 10% legal, 15% marketing. A time locked contract that the issuing teams tokens can't be traded or even owned by the team until certain milestones are met.

3. How do we look at other 'calls/predictions'? News? Financial products like shorts? Foreign exchange, stocks

4. Token cap, will we have a set number that are "found" as transactions are made. I.e I make a transaction to an investor I follow and have a 0.001% chance of discovering new tokens. Hard cap? Time based cap? Ie x number get found each year to maintain price stability.

5. How does the token trade work? Do they sign up for a month - get access to all of the previous calls, information and current calls? If so they can effectively see the portfolio of all leaders quite cheaply and can then disappear. Can we allow a leader to release things separately i.e. just portfolio breakdown for $x, then additional for information and future calls?

6. Are calls made against the dollar figure or the bitcoin figure?

7. How does the payment method work?

8. How do leaders get represented for their previous calls, i.e. before trackies ever exited? Do previous calls matter? Should we allow them to have their previous portfolio?

9. How does information get surfaced? What format

10. Can we allow tracking against bot calls being read in? A way for investors to honestly track the performance of bots?

Problems that will damage the integrity of the platform

1. How do we stop a single trader becoming big enough that they can manipulate the market and continue to improve their own performance - a spiral of success.

What happens if traders decide not to charge much at all to build a following, then use it to manipulate the market?

Be careful a single trader doesn't become so powerful they can manipulate the market
• Cap the number of calls per period? But this will hurt our attempts at promoting free open markets and it will not work with bots
• Charge fee based on portfolio performance ranking

2. How to stop people copying other people's portfolio and information and claiming it as their own?

• Does it matter if they copy the portfolio? That's kind of the point
• According to an efficient market hypothesis - Once information is available hasn't the market already reacted?

3. How do we stop people having multiple accounts on such a scale that they can eventually get lucky with one account? Sybil attack

Need to make sure the user can't create multiple accounts to play the numbers and hence have 10 accounts making opposite calls on the coins and ending up with a 'super' account

• Wait period after sign up before you can have followers?
• Is this going to be a problem? Once the market gets big enough the rubbish and noise accounts will fall to the waste?
• Research how identity blockchain platforms actually work? Perhaps a partnership?

4. Legality of the platform - You can't give financial advice if you aren't a financial advisor

• In which jurisdiction?
• Once the platform is created it can't be bought down
• You don't know who the person is who owns the account.
• Does cryptocurrency and tokens even count as financial advise? Or is it only if you use financial products such as shorting and taking a position?

5. How do we include derivatives of certain tokens i.e. airdrops, staking etc?

6. How do we make sure the inflation of the token doesn't ruin the usage of the token and promote long term 'hodlers'?

• Market rate?
• Rate based on ranking?
• Let the value naturally inflate, but keep it divisible?

7. How can people game the system to just pump their account/performance?

• Potentially through the rankings of their information?
• Organised pump and dump schemes
• Can we create a ranking to vote out users who are obviously pumping and dumping?

8. How do we stop the leader inviting its followers to follow them on an alternative platform and then take advantage?

• Simple warnings not to communicate outside of this platform??

Why do people use brokers?

1. Access to IPOs and inI did a high level design of this application a few months ago with the intention of building it out. Unfortunately, I became too busy with personal life and other business ventures. Rather than holding onto it, I would love to see this platform being built, even if I didn't build it myself, as I think it will bring transparency and force integrity in the promotion of projects/tokens (yes I did just use those synonymously).

Finally, I think it is an application that truly benefits from a blockchain over a database. Good luck with taking on this project, I will be keeping an eye out for it.
P.s. The name Trackies is for fun, whereby we would track calls made by investors whilst a play on the Australian phrase of referring to tracksuits as trackies. Comment below if you want me to answer any follow up questions

Trackies – Investment calls on the blockchain

Like a twitter for advisors (leaders) to announce their trades and have their work rewarded by having investors (mates) follow them.

This platform aims to solve the problem of crypto transparency in trading. If you make a call on a token/cryptocurrency, it is recorded to the blockchain to allow potential investors to honestly monitor the performance of your portfolio. The token will be used to gain access to trading leaders calls, crypto information and current breakdown of their portfolio.

The future is, "check it on the blockchain", a future where you can't just promote your good calls and hide the bad ones.

As it works today, only regulatory bodies with finite resources, capped by the limits of the sovereign nation and its laws and the rigor of human intervention keep investment advisors honest. Worse, as we move to an international market, YouTubers, Twitter personalities and bloggers can steal the attention of investors, make multiple calls and sing to the mountain when some of these calls are correct, hide in the noise the calls that went belly up.

A centralised service that tracks portfolio performance can be corrupted and manipulated by big players, institutions and the hosting company. It could be hacked, attacked and bought down my malicious third parties. We never really know what the true state of the ledger looks like, locked behind firewalls and held in single institution databases. This lack of transparency hurts the integrity of any centralised system that wants to support the promotion and trust of good investors, offering real value and sustained performance of leaders.

The use of a blockchain for this application dominates its database peers by offering transparency, integrity, immutability, security and all without a single intermediary. The token has value instantly and the market for such a service already exists. Acknowledging that blockchain is less programmatically, read/write and update efficient than it's database peers, it seems quite obvious that this application gets more benefit from using a blockchain.

How will it work - high level

Portfolio performance: it all comes down to idea of a portfolio. I have zero balance, I make a call to buy x number of token y on this date. Tracked against an average of the major exchanges, if my token goes up by z% my track is up some %. If my token goes down z% my track is down some %.

• The user logins and creates an account. One account can be both a leader or mate.
• They look at the 'leaderboard' or search to find 'leaders'. Leader board can be expanded from the default top 20 leaders to up to 100 per page. The information provided before clicking on the profile include: number of mates, portfolio performance represented as either BTC/USD % gain, name, profile pic, possibly an approval rating based on the average of the scores of set metrics mates can leave feedback on.
• When they click on a leader they see a dashboard with the following information:
  • SEE notes titled "Metrics to be displayed"
• Follow a leader by loading their wallet and paying the leaders fee. The token has instant value by providing the payment method between mates and leaders
• The investors registers a call/transaction. Set criteria i.e. name of token/currency, time/date, amount. It's registered this to the blockchain, hence creating the start of their portfolio. OR create a trial portfolio, which isn't registered to the blockchain but let's them learn to use the system. This information is NOT publicly available
• Mates have the ability to filter leaders by time periods (i.e. what was the top broker during the dips), filter by crypto assets classes (product vs platform vs currency), individual coins, a collection of coins you've deemed of interest.

Metrics to be displayed to the users (BEFORE they follow)

1. How many calls have I made?
2. Number of Mates (followers)
3. How many tokens have I diversified in? Shades of grey pie chart.
4. When was my last call?
5. How frequent are my calls?
6. Approval rating score
7. Performance over time

Additional metrics to be displayed to the users (AFTER THEY FOLLOW)

1. Portfolio performance breakdown (the previous shades of grey pie chart showing diversification now comes alive with colours showing each token and it's %).
2. Any information shared (TBD- this might be priced separately)
3. Activity log of past calls
4. All future calls
5. More granular rating score - frequency, level of detail/sophistication, presenting them in any easy fashion or not.

What problems are we solving?

1. A public ledger free of investment conflicts, free of manipulation or corruption. Border less without the need for a single jurisdiction regulator

2. Honest comparison of portfolio performance of advisers

3. Transparency, anti-manipulation, anti-corruption, can't be shut down, international and owner less.

Questions about building a blockchain application I still need to understand

1. What are the pros/cons of the potential consensus algorithms? Which metrics do you use to determine which consensus algorithms to use.

2. Which blockchain to build on? What's the benefit of each? Which metrics are important? (community, transaction speed, security, network, future developers plans?)

3. How do most of people with an idea go about building their first blockchain project? Are you all doing it by yourself? Have you raised capital to put together a team? Have you got at third party development team?

4. How do you test? Obviously using a testnet, but do the same developers do the testing or have you hired a third party?

5. How does the order of importance building a blockchain application differ from a standard webapp? i.e. do you need to have the front end webapp designs, then marry that to a data structure and pitch it all together?

6. How do we work with a wallet or other existing wallets? Obviously this depends on the blockchain you develop on, ERC20?

7. How does the token sale actually work? It is manual? Do they just transfer and leave an address?

8. How to create the software for people to act as nodes? This is separate to the application code right? This is the protocol that dictates everything

9. How and what data do we store where? Obviously there's a transaction fee to respect on the blockchain networks, so you don't want to store everything, how do you determine what needs to be on the blockchain? Just what needs to be immutable, transparent, censorship resistant etc etc. Does the rest just get stored on IPFS and CDNs?

10. How does identity work on the blockchain - who verifies that you are who you say you are? How do we stop sybil attacks? If you don't know who the user is, how do you stop people signing up for multiple accounts and interacting with one another to game the system?

11. Account vs private keys - security vs convenience? How do you decide?

12. Do you have to create a blockchain before you can do an ico? If not, how does it work? How can you distribute tokens without an existing blockchain?

13. How do you set the gas amount to be paid per write to the blockchain? How do you scale that with the blockchain transactions?

What gets stored on the blockchain?

The call and all of it's components, including:

• Type - buy/sell
• Token/currency
• Date/time of the call commit
• Increment of the call to the total number of calls
• Total number of calls per person
• Code

Token related questions

• How many?
• Burn vs movement
• How many do we keep ourselves
• How many do we keep and distribute?
• How does the time locked contracts work for ensuring trust to investors that developers won't 100% of the token and run off

Questions about the platform/business

1. How do we want to do ICO/fundraising

2. ICO or capital raising - 25% held by the team, 50% development, 10% legal, 15% marketing. A time locked contract that the issuing teams tokens can't be traded or even owned by the team until certain milestones are met.

3. How do we look at other 'calls/predictions'? News? Financial products like shorts? Foreign exchange, stocks

4. Token cap, will we have a set number that are "found" as transactions are made. I.e I make a transaction to an investor I follow and have a 0.001% chance of discovering new tokens. Hard cap? Time based cap? Ie x number get found each year to maintain price stability.

5. How does the token trade work? Do they sign up for a month - get access to all of the previous calls, information and current calls? If so they can effectively see the portfolio of all leaders quite cheaply and can then disappear. Can we allow a leader to release things separately i.e. just portfolio breakdown for $x, then additional for information and future calls?

6. Are calls made against the dollar figure or the bitcoin figure?

7. How does the payment method work?

8. How do leaders get represented for their previous calls, i.e. before trackies ever exited? Do previous calls matter? Should we allow them to have their previous portfolio?

9. How does information get surfaced? What format

10. Can we allow tracking against bot calls being read in? A way for investors to honestly track the performance of bots?

Problems that will damage the integrity of the platform

1. How do we stop a single trader becoming big enough that they can manipulate the market and continue to improve their own performance - a spiral of success.

What happens if traders decide not to charge much at all to build a following, then use it to manipulate the market?

Be careful a single trader doesn't become so powerful they can manipulate the market
• Cap the number of calls per period? But this will hurt our attempts at promoting free open markets and it will not work with bots
• Charge fee based on portfolio performance ranking

2. How to stop people copying other people's portfolio and information and claiming it as their own?

• Does it matter if they copy the portfolio? That's kind of the point
• According to an efficient market hypothesis - Once information is available hasn't the market already reacted?

3. How do we stop people having multiple accounts on such a scale that they can eventually get lucky with one account? Sybil attack

Need to make sure the user can't create multiple accounts to play the numbers and hence have 10 accounts making opposite calls on the coins and ending up with a 'super' account

• Wait period after sign up before you can have followers?
• Is this going to be a problem? Once the market gets big enough the rubbish and noise accounts will fall to the waste?
• Research how identity blockchain platforms actually work? Perhaps a partnership?

4. Legality of the platform - You can't give financial advice if you aren't a financial advisor

• In which jurisdiction?
• Once the platform is created it can't be bought down
• You don't know who the person is who owns the account.
• Does cryptocurrency and tokens even count as financial advise? Or is it only if you use financial products such as shorting and taking a position?

5. How do we include derivatives of certain tokens i.e. airdrops, staking etc?

6. How do we make sure the inflation of the token doesn't ruin the usage of the token and promote long term 'hodlers'?

• Market rate?
• Rate based on ranking?
• Let the value naturally inflate, but keep it divisible?

7. How can people game the system to just pump their account/performance?

• Potentially through the rankings of their information?
• Organised pump and dump schemes
• Can we create a ranking to vote out users who are obviously pumping and dumping?

8. How do we stop the leader inviting its followers to follow them on an alternative platform and then take advantage?

• Simple warnings not to communicate outside of this platform??

Why do people use brokers?

1. Access to IPOs and information = ICO + maybe an information section?
2. Knowledge of companies and investment opportunities= Included in platform?
3. Comfort of trading = Blockchain provides immutable proof of backing
4. Personalised service= Maybe a chat feature? Chat bot?
5. Competitive pricing for IPOs and Forex
   formation = ICO + maybe an information section?
6. Knowledge of companies and investment opportunities= Included in platform?
7. Comfort of trading = Blockchain provides immutable proof of backing
8. Personalised service= Maybe a chat feature? Chat bot?
9. Competitive pricing for IPOs and Forex

EDIT: This is similar to eToro but decentralised, democratised and open.