SanR Beta: What we’ve learned about crypto price signals, decentralized economies, and “martial arts of the mind”
In the fall of 2020, we (at Santiment) started an experiment.
Could we capture lightning in a bottle? — That moment of insight when one realizes what will happen next in the crypto market.
The moment that’s right for the trade.
You knew the direction the price would go, and it went beautifully.
What is it about these moments of clarity… can we record them, make them repeatable, prove them… monetize them?
SanR has this purpose at its heart. Participants improve their trading skills, generate price signals and monetize their knowledge.
So did this come to pass?
What have we learned so far on this journey?
Birth of an NFT sidechain
The goal for the SanR beta was two-fold: develop technology and prove (or disprove) some core hypotheses.
The technology includes many moving parts, and had not been done by any other project before (at least none that we were aware of). We’re building a decentralized “ownership economy” dedicated solely to market intelligence and tokenization of such (proven) knowledge. Whatever network participants create belongs to them forever, regardless if Santiment exists or not.
Crypto price signals, therefore, have to be stored on-chain. They need to be cheap and easily accessible. Plus they are financial signals, which are a basic piece of market knowledge, so we needed to develop a monetization path for those generating value.
We started building the system on ETH Mainnet + Kovan, as our SAN token is ERC20 and key to the marketplace structure. This setup was fine for testing… it allowed us to figure out some essential mechanics… but it turned out to be far too cost-prohibitive to scale to any size.
So we built our own ETH L2 (NFT sidechain), where participants can wrap SAN, earn rewards and interact with the network for fractions of a cent. Called, mysteriously, the “SanR Network” ;P, one can connect via Metamask or other crypto wallet and stake SAN to open signals (i.e. make price predictions) and subscribe to others’ signal feeds.
An NFT is created for each signal someone opens, imprinting a record of their thought process that that they can learn from and others can verify. We’re also working on special “reward” NFTs for achieving certain performance levels.
We’re continuing to smooth out the UX, but we’re happy to say that the system is now running in production at sanr.app, building an immutable record of crypto trading psychology. We’d love to see you over there to give it a try!
The first key to good trading
“Since I joined SanR, I was able to test new strategies and ideas without risking
my own money. It has given me the ability to improve the entry and exit levels while getting rewarded. Amazing!”
- yp_discord. on SanR
We had a few core hypotheses going into the SanR beta, namely:
- Awareness is a powerful weapon. By observing (noting) your trading actions — which are driven by emotional responses to the market — you can get “release” of internal tensions over making wrong calls if there is no immediate financial punishment. You’ll also improve your skill by understanding your personal “trader DNA”.
- Everyone has their strong side. Sometimes it’s spotting the tops, be it for buying (yes, that’s a strong side, always triggered at the price top) or for selling. Sometimes, it’s for bottom formations and sometimes, one just might not be too active when there is no clear direction in the market.
These assumptions played out nicely. We saw plenty of examples of “improvements through awareness” and also patterns as participants constantly reacted to important market formations.
The numbers are quite impressive for the early beta:
- Total competing signals was 2826
- 1589 were in profits with total value of 15420%
- 1207 were in losses with total value of 15538%
Also it’s interesting to see the absolute value of the signals:
- 1009 signals generated > 5% performance
- 803 with > 5% losses
- 617 (positive) and 528 (negative) for >10%
- 162 (positive) and 256 (negative) with >20%
A few participants, such as “shortmaniac”, made several masterpiece calls:
For this next participant, “kaldes.eth” we see periods of limited losses, followed by profitable signals with gains outweighing losses.
The participant “decred” seems to know when to stop and exit, especially if the signal is in the green (a rare quality, showing controlled greed and fear).
The participant “san_swings” started with quite heavy losses, then seemed to reflect, adapt and improve over time so that a great amount of profitable signals emerged.
The list goes on. You can review all the great and different personalities here: https://sanr.santiment.net/leaderboards (select “All time”).
Next: SanR.app
After this collected experience and confirmation for our major assumptions, we are proceeding now to the next stage, where we bring the network to a bigger amount of people at sanr.app.
This stage is already colored with early-stage “monetization of your skills” and “gamification of the process”. If you like trendy words, that would be P2E (and also P2L — play to learn) + NFT as the piece of your intelligence and an access/gate to someone else’s intelligence.
We’ve just introduced a new rewards structure with three Leagues that recognize different aspects of your trading behavior and progress. If you get in early, your chances are better to rack up rewards in mastering the martial arts of crypto.
Since 2016, Santiment has been developing innovative ways to understand the mechanics of crypto markets. Our flagship app, Sanbase, is the place to go for everything one needs to run behavior analyses of crypto assets. Developers can subscribe to our SanAPI to access raw data and metrics for professional use. Most recently we’ve launched SanR, a source of decentralized market intelligence (the “missing part in DeFi”).
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