A 3-month old start up, Strix Leviathan (https://strixleviathan.com/) is positioning themselves to be the future of crypto trading. Will it work out? Who knows, but I wanted to dive into what they're about so I could share it with the SteemIt community.
More impressively, they recently closed a seed round of $1.625mm and are looking to become the go-to trading platform for the best performing asset class 5 out of the last 6 years. Their vision, analogous to the gold rush, is to be the provider of the picks and shovels (where most of the money was made) vs. those actually panning for gold.
Their home page boasts:
Strix Leviathan has built an institutional-grade algorithmic investment management platform. Designed from day one for cryptocurrency markets, this platform executes programmable automated trading strategies based on proprietary technical analysis. We are a team of technologists and data scientists applying decades of computing knowledge, cloud and infrastructure experience and entrepreneurial acumen to build something bordering on mythical.
What is their value proposition?
DATA INGESTION AND TRANSFORMATION ENGINE: Basically they are going to be pulling data from all the exchanges to normalize the noise of inconsistent information. Their hope is that will allow them to formally test trading strategies... because right now, we really have no way to validate success, we just know if the price goes up or down (our trading strategies aren't really successful unless we can't replicate it).
PROPRIETARY TRADING ALGORITHMS: This sounds fancier than it looks to be... but basically they are trying to build an algorithm that looks at momentum stats (remember they're supposedly getting data from a bunch of exchanges) to market time. If anyone remembers the "Flash Crash" or Michael Lewis's book Flash Boys, this seems to be a similar idea. If they can know where the markets are going before everyone else (in today's stock trading world, milliseconds matter), then in theory they can realize profits until this type of trading becomes table stakes.
TRADE EXECUTION ENGINE: Their goal is to have 1 API that supports trading across multiple exchanges for increase liquidity and to increase the odds of arbitraging inconsistencies.
Now that we know that they're trying to accomplish.... Can we trust the creators?
TEAM - Notable Members
Ryan Tomayko: Beyond being a principle engineer at Heroku (sold to Salesforce) he recently departed as the as CTO of GitHub and was one of the first ten employees. So you know this guys has seen thousands of projects and wouldn't just jump into somehting that didn't have merit.
Steve Alkire: Has his PhD in physics from Columbia and did research for ATLAS at CERN (you know, the famous accelerated science lab) in Switzerland for 4 years.
Jesse Proudman: Serving as the CEO, Jesse is a serial entrepreneur having raised more than $20mm in capital for prior projects. After founding and bootstrappinng Blue Box, Jesse sold to IBM in 2015 and has been preparing for the crypto space since.
Advisory Board
Nicolas Cary: Co-Founder and President of Blockchain.com will be contributing to the teams vision.
Robert Raney CFA: A long time student of the markets was the Director of Valuation for a large Hedge Fund, and is now working on his PhD at University of Washington.
Kory Hoang: Co-Founder and CEO of Stably.io serves as an advisor to the team to contribute expertise.
Where are they going from here?
It's not clear that they have what it takes, and we obviously need to be skeptical of projects like this, especially from people who weren't early in the crypto space... but they've assembled a team that seems robust enough to meet the challenges we've dealt with trading cryptos to date.
This is obviously an institutional move, which increase the push for crypto trading toward more centralization. But it could also mean that with more, big-money players using sophisticated algorithms, that the volatility will drop making trading more palatable for the rest of us. It may also cut out a lot of the hype for cryptos that have no basis in being on an exchange, or that those who are building for the future (i.e. having a strong white paper and proven algo, like PoS).
Would love to hear everyone's thoughts. I'm not sure what to expect but look forward to seeing how this plays out.... Worst case, I buy one of their shirts cause their logo is DOPE!