Onramp Tech Corner:

Open Sourcing (Ideas At Onramp) IAO.

For the readers who know Onramp Invest, you probably know that in many ways we run the company like a blockchain- we achieve consensus before new bodies of work are contemplated, and we don’t add new “blocks’’ of work until we achieve consensus. How do we achieve consensus when there is often a lack of clarity?

The DAO, of course! “Decisions at Onramp,” is a method for filtering and identifying the signal from the noise in order to achieve consensus. Onramp Invest runs on a different operating system than other companies.

Onramp is a technology company building an integration platform for the future. Without the Onramp Platform, traditional investment advisor software would be unable to connect to the cryptoasset economy. In order to build for this future, we make it our mission to design tools and integrations that developers will want to plug into. If we do not focus on the developer experience, we fail in our mission. In addition to creating API solutions that delight, another area near and dear to the Onramp culture is that of giving back wherever possible.

Open is Better:

Research and education are critical tools needed for any financial advisor or individual investor to make thoughtful decisions about the new asset class.

What we find so exciting about this new asset class is that so much of it was built on the ideas of an open, DE-centralized financial system. This is contrary to traditional asset markets where investment tooling and research are done in ivory towers, where hedge fund managers and investment bankers covet their secretive models and research methods in order to gain an “edge” over their competition.

We aim to change that: we strive to be the company that stands as a beacon of change in the investment industry; a company where research, education, and tools act as enablers for ALL end clients, not just the highest wealth clients who can afford the firms with the biggest budget.

It only takes a moment for someone to realize how much more value a society can create through the open exchange of ideas and methods. Just look at the Internet vs. AOL, or Wikipedia vs the Encyclopedia Britannica. It doesn’t take long to appreciate and understand where software, financial markets, and investment ideas are headed. Open is better. We embrace and welcome this change towards open, decentralized ways of thinking and working together.

E-A-T Education, Access & Tools:

At Onramp, we are here to help advisors and their clients “EAT”; we want to give them the Education, Access, and Tools that they need to work with this cryptoasset class just as they would any other asset class.

In the spirit of the open-source movement, we see no reason why everyone shouldn’t benefit from the work we are doing. With the help of the Blockforce Capital’s Quantitative Research team and the Onramp Engineering team, we will be creating a series of articles and tools, as well as open source github repos, for everyone interested in learning from or building upon the work that we do. We hope that a community will evolve to create better visualizations and representations of crypto data and information that everyone can benefit from.

The first project we will be publishing is our “Asset Returns Quilt Charts”, as shown below:

These asset class return quilt charts are commonplace in the investment industry, but often lack the “modern asset classes’’ such as crypto. We designed these as a visual tool for investors to understand how cryptoassets fit into a typical mix of various asset classes. We also show how a “60/40 Stock/Bond’’ allocation behaves in the mix. Using 60% Stocks and 40% Bonds as a proxy for the traditional asset allocation benchmark, we then spice it up a bit by demonstrating how the addition of a 1% to 5% allocation to bitcoin would have improved or detracted from the returns.

Building the Charts:

The primary ingredients in this Tech Corner Series: D3.js, an open source library for creating interactive graphics, and PHP scripts to interact between the front-end and back-end. We are also using another open source project, MySQL, as a database to host the data.

Data

Data is sourced from Coincap.io which interfaces with a variety of global exchanges. Developers looking to interact with Coincap.io’s free APIs can read through their documentation here.

For traditional market data, we are using our various market data vendors who charge for the service. In the future, we will seek to identify cost-effective ways for users to acquire this data, but in the meantime they are free to view our tools on Onramp Research. For Onramp Academy members, they can access these tools and more via Onramp Academy.

Code

Future “Onramp Tech Corner” blog articles will go through the various pieces of the code, and then will pull it altogether for you to deploy on your own server. Stay tuned for the next article in the series, where we demonstrate a high level overview of how to build a simple web app that gathers, processes, and hosts data in an interactive chart for others to view and interact with it.

About Onramp Invest, Inc.
Onramp Invest is an iPaaS (integration platform as a service) technology company providing access to cryptoassets for registered investment advisors. Our comprehensive cryptoasset management solution will enable advisors to help their clients safely, confidently, and intelligently invest in the new age all within their existing workflows and billing models.

‍Led by Tyrone Ross, a licensed investment advisor and powerful storyteller with a passion for digital assets and their ability to disrupt our current way of life. He was recognized by Investment News 40 under 40 (2019), and WealthManagement.com as a top ten advisor set to change the industry in 2019.FinancialPlanning.com named him as one of 20 people who will change wealth management in 2020. He was recently named as Investopedia’s Top 100 financial advisors, and Think Advisor’s 2021 IA25: VIP’s Pushing Advisors Forward.

Co-Founder, Eric Ervin, most recently founded, led and sold the ETF company, Reality Shares, Inc. While at Reality Shares he incubated two companies, Onramp and, a cryptocurrency alternative investment firm, Blockforce Capital. Eric is known for his ability to understand and solve difficult financial and regulatory challenges which he views as “engineering” problems. He also understands the needs facing the financial advisor, prior to founding Reality Shares and Blockforce Eric spent 17 years as a financial advisor at Morgan Stanley and Smith Barney.