Uncertainty 2019 — London meetup

Key takeaways from an evening with Cindicator

I had the pleasure of hosting the first London Cindicator community event last month, with guest appearances from two members of the team — CTO Yuri Lobyntsev and CLO Roman Buzko. As the Cindicator network has been live for more than a year now I was really keen to understand what they’d learned from the experience, and what lies in the year ahead as the project continues to enhance its range of analytical products.

For more information about Cindicator’s first year, you can read my previous blog post which summarises key milestones since the crowdsale.

Held in central London, the theme for the evening related to decision-making in times of uncertainty. The timing for the theme felt fitting — Bitcoin had only very recently broke below yearly support and plunged to the lower $3k range, and the news agenda that day was filled with uncertainty around the UK government’s Brexit deal.

I was up first to introduce the theme and talk about my involvement with Cindicator:

It was then that the evening kicked off in earnest, with a presentation and Q&A session with Yuri, in which he expanded upon the topic of uncertainty. He started by summarising what Cindicator is: “We are working to understand how the mind works, how to use it, and how to use it in the most efficient way.” Cindicator’s purpose, he explained, is to support cognitive processes for better decision making. This led into the topic of uncertainty, focusing on the challenges it places on decision making across many spheres and how, when properly embraced, it can actually help unlock human creativity:

To finish the more formal portion of the evening, I sat down with Roman to talk about the regulatory landscape in crypto and to explore some of the developments aiming to help bridge crypto and the traditional finance world, such as STOs and stablecoins:

Key takeaways

The evening provided interesting food for thought on how we — individually and collectively — approach decisions that can have a massive bearing on our lives. It also gave attendees a glimpse into the road ahead for Cindicator and its growing network of analysts, traders and investors. What was quite apparent is that we’re still only in the very early stages of working towards Cindicator’s true vision, with lots of exciting products and other milestones ahead.

Some points of particular interest:

· We discussed the concept of the ‘wisdom of the crowd’ as it contrasts with the ‘madness of the crowd’ — often a symptom of the groupthink inherent in the age of incessant communications. A hybrid intelligence model seeks to embrace the wisdom of independent perspectives in a transparent and expertise-weighted way.

· Yuri described the architecture of Cindicator’s network, with multiple layers including human intelligence, statistical models and (currently one) neural network. As the models are trained with more and more data, the goal is to find greater accuracy within each question type.

· Yuri shared some interesting insights and patterns he’s observed from the forecaster data. Most notably, he mentioned that he’s noticed some divergences between the forecasters that are most accurate in day-to-day forecasting, and those who more accurately identify and react to impending ‘black swans’ in their predictions. Being able to harness the intelligence of these different clusters will be an important part of developing more accurate modelling for the volatile crypto markets.

· Yuri gave some hints at what lies ahead for Cindicator, including:

• the possibility of increasing the number of questions asked on a weekly basis;
• the intention to transition to a proprietary indicators platform in order to solve the user onboarding issues with Telegram;
• increasing support for users to act upon indicators; and
• mention of some new analytical products to come in the first half of 2019 (!!)

· Roman shared some insight into the approach being taken by the SEC in its enforcement action against ICOs. He said we’re currently in phase one, which involves ‘putting red flags where they should have been before,’ demonstrated by action against companies that had clearly fallen below the standards expected by the regulator. Roman said it remains to be seen whether this leads to a more constructive framework for token sales.

· He talked about potential ‘self-policing’ frameworks for token sales, such as the consumer token framework (aka ‘The Brooklyn Project’) which aims to promote both economic growth and consumer protection. He also shared his scepticism of Security Token Offerings (STOs) and potential issues with making financial assets ‘too liquid’ and with encouraging ‘short-termism’ in equity funding.

As a Cindicator ambassador, I came away from the evening feeling more enthusiastic than ever about the project. The team has a bold vision, with the skills and intellectual curiosity to make it happen. It was also great to bring together the London Cindicator community, which we hope to build significantly in 2019.