Santiment Overview: How We’ll Transform Crypto-Trading (w/ PRESALE info!)
There’s a serious problem in the blockchain space; We’re building the future of finance, yet we lack the tools to trade effectively. This is why we’re building Santiment, blockchain’s first crypto-market intelligence platform and trading terminal, fueled and owned by the community.
I’m Mitchell Loureiro, communications lead at Santiment. I stumbled across Santiment after reading one of Maksim Balashevich’s blog posts on sentiment analysis. It quickly become clear to me that what he’s building is the future of data-driven trading… so I signed on. You see, when I first entered the crypto-markets I had some serious problems trading. There was no reliable market intelligence; instead I got a never-ending flow of misinformation. And where were the crypto-specific analytics? Trading journals? Basic tools? There were few to be found. Finally, it was apparent that the crypto-markets ran on crowd sentiment, yet there was no way to get that kind of data. In short, my trading was handicapped.
All I wanted was to trade with discipline, to identify and correct my flaws where I saw them, and of course to boost/enhance profitability. And by tying the use of trading tools to a competitive Ethereum token system, Santiment’s making the perfect way to incentivize one’s trading enhancement. But before I dive into that I’ll show you just how pervasive these crypto-problems are, and why I believe Santiment is the solution.
Trading is hard. Crypto-trading is harder.
I’ll be honest with you; Trading is hard. Really hard. Most traders lose money, even in bull markets like crypto where FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) is rampant. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Trading is a skill and it can be sharpened systematically with measurable results (like more profit!). A big problem with crypto-trading today is that few tools for systematic improvement are available for crypto-traders! Let’s go through these parts one by one.
- No Reliable Information; Just Hype, FUD, and FOMO
Maybe you’ve tried to get reliable information on the market; I certainly have. And that’s shown me how unimaginably difficult it is. It’s not because there isn’t data; There’s a LOT of data. It’s just that there’s a huge amount of misinformation mixed in, to the point that getting reliable crypto-intelligence is almost impossible. It reduces us to fundamental analysis alone.
And I get this, I do; People have incentives to act this way. Hypers hype because they want to see their coin moon and make off with a 10x return. FUDers sow FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) because their shorts depend on it … or are looking to pick up cheap coins. All this goes around and, when mixed with the extreme volatility that we see in crypto, creates a kind of eternal FOMO for new and experienced traders alike that costs them money.
Now eventually you get over the FOMO…but not before losing your money, trust, and innocence. And really, does it have to be that way? There are people out there producing reliable trading and trend information…they’re just drowned out by the trolls. Guess what… It gets worse.
2. Lack of Crypto-specific Tools Means Trading Weaknesses Stay Invisible
We can all feel when we’re losing… but metrics are the only things that show us just how much. When we start crypto-trading it’s apparent there are weaknesses, leaks that drain our profit, but if you want to find those in a concrete way crypto has few tools to offer! Have you manually entered in entry and exit points on a graph? It sucks. In crypto we have 3 options: Chart it ourselves, port data to non-crypto services, or do without. And that’s just not acceptable. All this when a computer can deliver actionable analytics in the blink of an eye… but still nothing public is adapted for crypto.
If we can’t put data on a page and let the objective results stare back at us, how’re we going to improve? How’re we going to find the holes in our strategy that drain precious profit? We can’t! Trading journaling and analytics tools aren’t an option…they’re a NECESSITY for any serious trader.
3. Crypto is the Crowd, But Sentiment is Completely Unknown
The final problem is the worst one. At least for the other 2 there are bandaids and stopgaps that mitigate opportunity-loss…but for sentiment analysis there’s just no solution but intuition. Crypto trends on the sentiment of the crowd, on its emotions of excitement or despair. Yet there’s nowhere you can go to find data on sentiment. So the key for understanding the crypto-markets, crowd sentiment, is simply not accessible for current traders. If only there was a data-source that reflected the crowd sentiment of the community in a representative way, in real time…
These are the problems Santiment is solving. Blockchain trading is the future, but we’re using tools from the past. They should, no, they must be better. With that in mind, here’s an overview of how we’re solving these problems with Santiment.
The Santiment Solution — Future Vision
The fundamentals of everything we’ll be building at Santiment revolve around solving the 3 aforementioned problems: accurate information, discipline-enhancing tools, and crowd sentiment tracking. Solutions here would boost participating trader profitability. With that in mind, here’s the future Santiment vision.
The Santiment vision is that of a complete crypto-trading environment, a sort of ‘Bloomberg Terminal’ for crypto. This includes the following features:
- Personal and crowd sentiment tracking and visualization
- Crowd sentiment data collection (both on the Santiment platform and beyond it)
- Personal trading analytics and journaling tools with exchange integration
- Crypto-trading games (including a simulator) where players are rewarded for accurate predictions, backed by a crypto-economic token.
- Santiment reputation scores pegged to prediction accuracy and made private with zero-knowledge proofs (ZK-SNARKs)
- A crypto-financial network where high value content is monetized (via the token network) and made reliable (via public Santiment reputation scores)
This combination of tools is very ambitious, but we believe it could solve our 3 major trading problems and create a new standard for trading in cryptocurrency and blockchain assets.
Accuracy of information comes from making a trading environment with vetted sources of information. Trading discipline is improved with analytics and intuitive visualizations of past trades. The creation of a crowd sentiment tracking and visualization mechanism finally make blockchain crowd sentiment data available to traders.
If all of these can be combined into an easy-to-use environment, accessible from both mobile and desktop, then the stage would be set for a new level of professionalism in crypto-trading. This is what Santiment is out to make.
The Santiment MVP
Santiment is an ambitious project, so early market validation is critical. With that in mind we’ll be launching a presale to raise money for our Minimum Viable Product (MVP). This MVP will show the community what we’re capable of; The community can then show us how much they want Santiment in the crowdsale, after we’ve been vetted.
The core of the Santiment MVP will be a personal sentiment tracker and visualization game. With the Santiment MVP you’ll be able to predict prices, compare your predictions to friends, and see who’s most accurate with visualizations on the charts.
In the future the personal sentiment tracker will be integrated with a crypto-trading simulator, a group sentiment environment, and the Santiment token system to reward users for accurate predictions. But all of this starts with an MVP.
The Santiment Token System
While the Santiment tools create value by making trading clearer and easier, the most innovative part of the Santiment network will be the token system.
The Santiment token system reflects our new paradigm of data-mining, where the crowd of users is the beneficiary of data collection. Users contribute data to the network by using the tools (which are free) and are rewarded for crypto-game accuracy in the form of Santiment Network Tokens (constituting ‘mining’). The total aggregate of data will be collected in a privacy-centric manner and available for purchase on the Santiment platform to a limited number of people. To get the data, buyers will have to pay with Santiment Network Tokens.
As the network grows and more people use the free tools, the crowd sentiment data will become increasingly accurate, and therefore more valuable. As the price growth for crowd sentiment data outstrips the fixed-rate production of new tokens for the trading game, there could be beneficial effects on the value of Santiment Network Tokens. This would create an even stronger incentive to win our crypto-financial games, which will create even more participants. This in turn pulls new users to create even more valuable data, thereby creating a positive feedback loop (or virtuous cycle).
This is the fundamental model behind the Santiment ecosystem. Fundamentally useful and advantageous tools kickstart the network, while the feedback cycle speeds up to create increasingly valuable financial data. As the data price increases with the value, all token-holders share in the rewards of the network. It’s a new model of data-mining that puts power and rewards in the hands of users.
There are hundreds of thousands of daily crypto-traders today, spread across dozens of exchanges. To kickstart our growth we will start our promotion in China. China is the fastest growing market of crypto-traders and we believe Santiment will make their trading introduction as easy as posisble.
But before any of that comes, Santiment will begin with a Presale.
The Presale
To see whether the market (that’s you!) wants the Santiment technology or not, we’ll be doing a presale and a crowdsale. Here are our aims:
1. A Presale, aiming to raise a minimum of 4000 ETH and a maximum of 12000 ETH
2. A future crowdsale, aiming to raise a minimum of $500,000 and a maximum of $1,500,000.
The date of the presale is set for February the 12th, 2017 at 23:50 GMT and will be active for 3 weeks. Presale participants will get their tokens at the moment of the crowdsale. Presale participants will receive 54% more tokens in the crowdsale relative to the amount they contributed in the presale.
NOTE: These tokens are strictly for use on the Santiment network for Santiment services. They have no other intended uses.
For example, if a participant contributed $10,000 in the presale and $10,000 in the crowdsale, they would receive the following: (10,000 x 1.54) + (10,000 x 1) = $25,540 worth of Santiment Network Tokens.
We are doing the presale to build a prototype product as fast as possible: By doing so, we’ll demonstrate to the community that Santiment is worth their money and participation. The larger crowdfund itself will occur in several months, after we have our MVP ready to show.
Some people may ask why we set our crowdfund limits so low… and that’s because we are building tools both useful and viable. We don’t believe we need $10 million to build an MVP.
ICOs are a major innovation in the crypto-space, but they‘re abused as if they were free money. With Santiment we want to encourage a different model: One of financial accountability and responsibility to our contributors and transparency to the community at large.
If you want to see Ethereum pioneer technologies and business models like Santiment, then we encourage you to contribute when the presale starts.
Conclusion
This is all just the beginning for Santiment. There’s so much more to say and do… but that’s for the future. Here are some articles we have planned in the coming months for you:
The Santiment Target Markets and Go-To Market Plan
How Santiment Synergizes with Gnosis, Augur, and Iconomi
The Santiment Team: Who We Are and Why We’re Here
A Deep Dive on the Santiment Token Structure
Santiment MVP Design and Aims
How We’ll Gather Sentiment Data from Across the Crypto-Sphere
If any of these look interesting to you, or if you’d like to be a part of the Santiment presale, then sign up to our newsletter today by clicking here: http://www.santiment.net/ (Scroll down for the sign up form)
And if you’d like to talk to us directly, you can join our slack right now: https://santiment-slack.herokuapp.com/
We’ll have specific instructions and specifications for our Presale soon, so join our email list to stay in the loop!
Yours truly,
Mitchell
I’m the communications lead at Santiment, and a veteran in the crypto-marketing space. I use my eye for stories to create narratives that decentralize the world. If you’d like to know more about Santiment or get in touch, reach out to me at mjloureiro@protonmail.com
