Here is What We’ve Achieved Since the Beginning of the Year

In January, we outlined an ambitious roadmap for the first quarter of this year. In this post we’ll report on what we achieved. We’ll go over each task we set for ourselves at the beginning of the year. We’ll then outline the priorities for the rest of the year.

This period was a focal point in Cindicator’s transformation from a startup to a new type of decentralised symbiotic network organisation. In an article about the development of indicators, we already discussed how the sheer volume of data we generate has unlocked multiple pathways to implementing the first neural network. Today we’ll talk about how the team, the platform, and the products have evolved in the first three months of this year.

0. Expanding the Cindicator team

The most important goal for us was to further strengthen the team. Cindicator’s vision requires smart people to make it happen, and we’re happy to report that we have a lot of new faces in our offices.

We started this year with a team of 31 full-time employees and 23 advisers and consultants. Now we have 48 full-time employees in New York, St Petersburg and Moscow, supported by over 30 subcontracting companies. We’re now a transnational distributed network organisation with people working in five countries and even more time zones!

The Product Development Team is still the largest by far. It includes over 20 people developing analytical products, mobile apps, the backend and the data science models which power indicators. We’ve added several key team members and are looking to expand the team by adding more specialists in frontend, backend, QA, and UI/UX.

The Analytical Team continues to grow, dedicating even more resources to monitoring and analysing both crypto and traditional financial markets. Our team of traders and financial analysts also creates and monitors dozens of questions, which we send to 97,000+ decentralised analysts from nearly 150 countries. Some of these analysts might soon join us full time — we’ve received more than 500 applications to join the analytical team.

As we reported earlier, we’ve created a dedicated Marketing Team. The team includes specialists in public relations, digital marketing, content, and community. The only deviation from the plan is that we’ve postponed hiring a PR agency. As a first priority we aim to build up the foundations and we already have an internal team for that.

Finally, we’ve also welcomed Cindicator’s first full-time HR director, strengthening the Management Team. She will develop the office in St Petersburg and open a fully-fledged office in Moscow. Working closely with the founders, she will foster communications between all team members, whether they’re based in the New York HQ or elsewhere in the world.

If you’re interested in joining Cindicator (or know someone who might be), check the list of open positions. There couldn’t be a better time!

1. Cindicator Collective Intelligence platform

In January we set several key priorities for the forecasting platform:

• New statistics screen: many analysts use Cindicator to develop their forecasting skills, so we’ve made it easier for them to see how they’re doing. For the iOS app, we’ve added a new statistics screen with a history of points gained (or lost!) for each answer. Now you can see your rating for previous months and check if you’ve managed to improve your performance. If you click on a specific month, you can see detailed statistics for that period, including your number of forecasts, your average accuracy, and the number of points you earned for each question. It’s now a lot easier to track your progress!
• New types of questions: as planned, we’ve added questions about when you think a specific event will happen. You can easily submit your prediction by picking the date, the month, and the year. We think this type of question could be used to create valuable analytical products.
• Overall UX improvement: we have rebuilt question filters from scratch on all three platforms and completely redesigned the settings screen in the iOS and Android versions of the app. Analysts can now tune question feeds to their preferences and easily access their reward balance.

In total, this year we’ve made:

• 4 iOS app updates,
• 10 Android app updates,
• 3 web app updates.

The latest versions are now being reviewed by Apple and Google and will be available shortly after this post is published.

In addition to working on these updates, the team has invested dozens of hours into learning more about how and why analysts use the platform. We’ve sent out 1,500+ invitations to analysts and have completed 20 interviews with a combined length of over 10 hours. We then also invited about 4,000 analysts to complete a detailed survey about how they use the Cindicator apps. We now have an even better understanding of what features should be added. If you have any additional feedback, send us a quick email.

2. Cryptometer 2.2

As promised, we have released a new version of Cryptometer, the arbitrage bot. Let’s review the new features:

• Three-point arbitrage: a completely new way of using Cryptometer. You can now search for price discrepancies between more than two assets to identify far more arbitrage opportunities. You pick the base pair of the asset you want to accumulate, and then select other currencies which you’re willing to trade. This way you can build up the asset of your choice by exploiting arbitrage opportunities on a single exchange. This means you’ll never have to pay fees for transferring assets between exchanges.
• Better range of currency pairs: when we started working on this goal, we realised that there was scope for improving the way we collect data from exchanges. Without a robust data collection system, additional pairs wouldn’t work properly. So we made several major improvements and we now provide information much faster. Speed is a critical factor for profiting from time-sensitive arbitrage opportunities, even more important than having a large number of trading pairs. We can now quickly add any new pairs based on market realities.
• UX redesign: we’ve optimised the number of menu items, arranging them by popularity. You can now access the most used functions faster. Bot setup is also easier and requires fewer steps. The UX was also updated to add new features.
• Ability to set different thresholds for different pairs: you can now set different price thresholds for each trading pair. For example, you may want to have a 2% threshold for more liquid pairs, such as BTC/USD, and you could set a 5% threshold for less liquid pairs to justify entering those trades.
• Volume increase alert: you’ll soon receive alerts when an asset sees a surge in trading volumes. This feature also depended on having a robust method for collecting data from different exchanges. You’ll soon be able to sign up for alerts with information about the opportunity size in a specific pair currency, for example 0.5 BTC.

3. Analytical products — Cindicator Bot

In January we announced plans to add new functionality:

• Additional info about indicator reliability: we decided against adding this feature in the latest release, and here is why. It’s useful to have a measure of how reliable an indicator is. Yet a simple parameter such as the number of analyst answers could be misleading. A lower number doesn’t necessarily mean that an indicator is unreliable. For many ML models, the number of answers is not a critical variable. Although we developed confidence intervals for the previous version of the bot, the neural network makes them irrelevant. The neural network identifies relationships between various ML models and we’re working on developing a different metric.
• New indicators: we increased the number of token sale ranking indicators. We’ve also laid the foundations for custom questions, a much discussed feature. This will be rolled out in the beginning of the second quarter.

3a. Summary of Indicators

Earlier we’ve published Cindicator Bot. Progress to Date. Here is a short summary of it, please dive into the full article to know more about the indicators results.

Since the beginning of last year, we sent:

• 1,452 indicators in total;
• 1,298 binary indicators showing the probability of a financial event happening;
• 144 support and resistance level indicators;
• 10 ICO rankings (a new type of indicator added this year).

Here is a full list of all the indicators we’ve sent since Q4 2016. The spreadsheet starts with a recap of all indicators and their accuracy. It then outlines the breakdown of indicators sent in Q1 2018. It then lists the full information for all indicators sent during each previous quarter.

Cindicator Bot: Progress to Date

4. The new product: Token Sale Review

In January we announced a new product that would offer a comprehensive analytical system for tracking token sales with Hybrid Intelligence. This product now has a name: Token Sale Review.

Token Sale Review will provide detailed reports on specific token sales. First, Cindicator’s internal team of analysts will review a large number of projects. Weak and high-risk projects will be recorded in a stop list. For the most interesting token sales, we’ll send questions to Hybrid Intelligence, asking about the likelihood of reaching the hard cap, listings on different exchanges, etc. Finally, users of Token Sale Review will receive complete reports about the token sales with the greatest potential. The number of reports received will depend on their access tier.

We will talk about specific features when we open the pre-order in the second quarter. The first version of this product will be exclusively distributed to a limited number of our clients to collect initial feedback. Since there is a limited capacity of value for indicators, we will carefully select the first risk-takers who will be able to test this product. If you’re interested in Token Sale Review, follow our announcements to be the first to hear about the pre-order.

5. Working with active token holders and the community

We have continued to work closely with the community to source insights and ideas for further growing the ecosystem. We are currently testing different formats to find the most effective way of collaborating with our token holders.

To leverage the collective intelligence of the Cindicator ecosystem, we’ve launched the Cindicator Insight Challenge. We’re inviting all analysts and token holders to create and share content about how they use the platform and the products. You can read more about it in an earlier post. There’s still time to enter and win prizes!

6. Marketing & business development

We have assembled a fully-fledged marketing team and are doing the first internal marketing sprint. The sprint involves a diverse team of specialists in PR, marketing, content, and community management. The support team and product managers will also be engaged throughout the sprint. The sprint is focused on developing a comprehensive strategy and laying the foundations for telling the Cindicator story.

In January we set ourselves the goal of topping 100,000 analysts on the platform by the end of the first quarter. The number of analysts on the platform stands at over 97,000. We’ve launched a number of additional marketing channels and are mere days away from reaching this goal. Cindicator’s decentralised analysts already generate over 400,000 forecasts every month, more than 30 times the volume we had just half a year ago.

We are actively working on fostering long-term partnerships with exchanges and launching pilot projects with other partners. There are many interesting opportunities in the pipeline which have great potential to create value. We will announce details once all parties are ready to go public.

Events

At the beginning of the year, we said that Cindicator’s speakers would appear at major events which provide a platform for sharing our expertise, and update the global community on the progress we’ve made. These events make sure that we are always on the radar for influencers, potential institutional customers and partners.

CTO Yuri Lobyntsev spoke at Token2049, the leading digital assets event in Asia. His presentation at a session on blockchain and its applications was very well received. He was also interviewed by several major media outlets. Earlier in March, Yuri was one of the judges at the AMC Makethon 2018, where students and young developers competed to create AI algorithms. He has also been invited to speak at several major events taking place later this year. He has already been confirmed as a speaker at Webit.Festival Europe 2018, a gathering of EU policy makers and global innovation leaders. In May, Yuri will visit the World Satoshi Summit, South Asia’s biggest blockchain conference, to talk about creating a revolution by combining AI and blockchain. While in India, Yuri and CEO Mike Brusov will both serve as jury members for the Shark Tank-style International ICO Showcase.

Mike was a speaker at the Global Blockchain Forum in Santa Clara, the heart of Silicon Valley. The event brought together over 2,000 attendees and more than 30 speakers. It was a great opportunity to present Cindicator to senior business leaders. While in Silicon Valley, Mike also spoke at Stanford University. We were humbled to learn that some people travelled from as far as Brazil to meet Mike! And this week Mike is back in California to speak at the Alchemist Money Summit. He was invited as a speaker by Jeff Pulver, an entrepreneur and internet pioneer.

COO Artem Baranov will be taking part in Nordic IOT Week in Helsinki, a major tech event for Northern Europe. On 18 April, Artem will deliver a keynote on the token economy and a new distributed type of organisation. The conference is sure to provide plenty of opportunities to meet potential partners.

We also hosted our first Cindicator Crypto Meetup. Head of Analytics Kate Kurbatova, CIO Nodari Kolmakhidze, and Head of Community Yana Marakhonova met our token holders and top analysts in Vilnius, Lithuania. It was a very warm and friendly meeting, and we sure hope to have more in the near future!

There are more events in the pipeline. If you want to stay up to date with the team’s travel and receive other news, sign up for our newsletter.

Key priorities

During the rest of the year, we plan to build on what has been achieved in the first three months and continue the action plan we outlined for 2018. The team is focusing on the same tracks:

• Improving and refining the core technology;
• Creating valuable products for traders & investors;
• Expanding the team;
• Developing the business through partnerships.

By focusing on the priorities listed above, we’ll have the flexibility to improve the products as we uncover additional information.

We are officially no longer a startup. Yet our DNA retains the same approach that is focused on taking very small, fast, and flexible steps. We are always testing, always growing. Together we are creating an entirely new way of making decisions amid high uncertainty.

This is only the beginning. We had a very dynamic start to the year and have a lot of interesting opportunities. Keep an eye out for announcements — it’s going to be exciting!

To answer any questions about strategy or our organisational structure, we will host a Q&A session with the founders. The format, date and time will be announced later. There will of course be a recording and write-up of all answers.

Once again, thanks for being an active participant in our tokenised network. Your continued efforts, intellectual contributions, and constant feedback are crucial for the success of the Cindicator ecosystem.

Let’s make the new economy more intelligent

The Cindicator team