SwissBorg’s Brilliant Quantitative Crypto Analyst: Bastien Muster

Bastien was born and raised in Bienne, Switzerland where the iconic watchmakers, Rolex and Omega, are headquartered. His parents, a math/geography and a history/French teacher encouraged his intellectual curiosity and nurtured his love of math, physics and science. By the time he finished high school he knew he loved data science and physics and was torn between studying economics or physics his two passions.

After much thought and deliberation, Bastien realised that he loved physics too much to give it up. He was accepted at the EPFL where he attained a Bachelor’s degree in Physics and a Master’s degree in Particle Physics because he “always wanted to know how the universe was made, what happened to the big bang, and how will the universe evolve.” The young student spent his time working in the laboratory and was soon taken into the PhD program and hired as a teaching and research assistant to search for new particles at the LHCb experiment at CERN. A passionate researcher he loved looking for exotic particles that exist only in theory. Looking beyond the model to find new phenomena was exciting, but, Bastien explains, chuckling a little, “it was the Nobel prize or nothing!”

The four years at CERN taught him much about big data research, analyses, and machine learning turning him into a full-fledged data scientist. His old interest in economics and his new skills as a data scientist equipped him well for a change in fields, so he went to work for Rolex. The meticulous research skills that he had acquired as a PhD student at CERN helped him at the world’s most reputable watch company, known for the precision of its products, where he was in charge of optimisation of production flow and watch accuracy.

Two years ago, a friend began talking, and enthusiastically recommending, Bitcoin and investing in cryptoassets. For the next one and half years he followed the crypto space and decided that he wanted to be part of this industry. Excited about the possibilities of blockchain technology and how it could change the world he, “wanted to be part of it!”

When the same friend showed him the job listing at SwissBorg, Bastien saw his chance to enter the field and put to use his Data Science expertise and Machine Learning knowledge to enter this exciting and pioneering space, “I needed excitement and challenge, the adrenaline rush of being on the cutting edge of an industry, SwissBorg provided that.”

At the interview, he fell in love with the energy, diversity, and friendly openness of the SwissBorg team.

At SwissBorg he brings his analytic expertise to help with trading strategy, crypto classification, and risk rating. Classification will help the SwissBorg indices and the SwissBorg App. The hard-working, busy, but always smiling, Bastien, is presently working on a report for 2019 outlook, trading strategies, classification of the token, simulation for the SwissBorg App, helping to build the big data architecture at SwissBorg to build indicators and analyse the market. With the boyish exuberance of a young scientist he explains, “we will be able to know the different behaviours, how to understand the different industries to reach an understanding of the market. You can always have a model that will give you a relatively good forecast.”

Bastien believes that it is essential for traditional financial institutions to invest in blockchain technology ‘but we have to make sure we don’t end up with the same elitist culture I hope blockchain and crypto will help the poor populations of the world, giving them a fair trading platform.”

An avid sportsman, competitive tennis player and StarCraft 2 gamer, Bastien Muster loves searching for meaning, from particles at CERN to tokens in the crypto space. At the end of our interview, this son of the Swiss landscape, uses an appropriate analogy to explain his quest, “we have to understand the difference between the many tokens that exist, like being in a new forest with lots of plants and flowers, if you don’t know which are poisonous or comestible you can’t really know the forest.”

SwissBorg is Hiring! Find out if one of our promising positions is meant for you: https://jobs.lever.co/swissborg