SPECTRE.ai in a nutshell!
Diving into the SPECTRE project involves a great challenge for everyone. The challenge of not getting lost in the details. There are so many different aspects of the project that can be analysed and are indeed being analysed that sometimes, especially if you are a newcomer, it is easy to get lost in the details and miss out some key facts about the project.
The purpose of this post, is to help a newcomer overcome the above hurdle by providing a concise summary of all the important aspects of SPECTRE.
1. Introduction
SPECTRE, short for SPECulative Tokenized TRading Exchange is a prediction market trading platform with core focus on financial trading and betting. In financial trading, traders make a prediction and speculate on the rise or fall of the price of fast-moving global financial markets (or instruments) such as currencies, shares, indices, commodities and crypto currencies. Successful prediction of an instrument’s future price movement could yield significant profit.
A financial market prediction is the act of trying to determine the future value of the financial instrument. It is not about owning the underlying asset but about betting on that asset.
To draw a comparison to sports betting, think of a football game, Liverpool vs Manchester United, and think that you are betting on Liverpool to win. Similarly, in financial trading, the wager/bet will be against two currency pairs, for example EUR/USD, and you are betting on whether EUR is going to rise or fall against the USD.
I hope the above example clarifies that in SPECTRE, the underlying financial assets are not owned, and that SPECTRE is a prediction market platform, and NOT a crypto currency exchange.
2. The Problem we are solving.
The main issues with current financial trading and betting are that a) traders need to deposit to the broker’s account in order to start trading, and b) with the exception of A-book FX brokers, traders trade against the broker’s balance sheet. The latter means that a trader’s win is a broker’s loss. This creates a conflict of interest between traders and brokers, as the latter often resort to fraud, manipulation of prices and even refusal of withdrawals to the former thereby destroying trader’s balances and finances, over time.
These issues contribute to a staggering 70–90%+ industry loss ratio for the traders, meaning that more than 7/10 traders lose money in the longer run.
3. Why SPECTRE is the solution
Our model is unique and with the help of the Ethereum blockchain we are removing the broker from the equation completely to create a new paradigm of trading.
Firstly, in SPECTRE there is no concept of deposit. Traders trade from their own Ethereum wallet. Furthermore, traders trade against a liquidity pool funded by Token Sale investors and not against SPECTRE’s balance sheet and all transactions are governed by smart contracts.
The smart contracts pay out 2% rewards to token holders and 2% to SPECTRE as a technology fee, each time the trader takes a smart option trade. In the case of smart CFDs the rewards and fees are in the range of 2%-20% of spread. This is completely different to the traditional broker model where brokers get paid on trader losses.
As a result, SPECTRE delivers a sustainable, fair and transparent trading and betting environment with no conflict of interest between involved parties;. A provably fair battleground where traders can fairly trade against the market without outside intervention.
4. Does SPECTRE really need the Ethereum Blockchain to operate?
Blockchain and Smart contracts are what enables the existence of SPECTRE as a truly transparent and decentralised trading platform. Built on the Ethereum blockchain, SPECTRE’s platform combined with the decentralised and autonomous liquidity pool owned by the Token Sale investors takes the broker out of the equation completely resulting in a revolutionary change in the trading world and a new level of transparency. SPECTRE delivers genuine fairness to everyone, and not just certain parties within the trade process.
5. What is the Token Sale about
As mentioned above, an integral part of the entire project is the creation of an autonomous and decentralised liquidity pool that will be acting as the counter-party to traders’ financial predictions. In order to create this liquidity pool, we are launching a Token Sale and part of the proceeds will go to the creation of this liquidity pool (more information on the allocation of the proceeds can be found here).
The Token Sale is divided in two phases, a pre-sale and a public sale. The pre-sale will be from October 27th until November 5th, 2017 and the public sale will be from November 17th until December 10th, 2017. Two types of tokens, a dividend-token and a utility-token will be available during the crowdsale.
The dividend-token will be offering a 2% dividend on the amount of each transaction inside SPECTRE, while the utility-token will be offering in-platform benefits and participation to the SPECTRE token-buy-back program. (for more detailed information about the two tokens please click here). The issuing of tokens offers a chance to investors and traders alike to participate in the project and become part of a revolutionary idea that is trying to solve a real-life problem.
6. Our Team Background
Our team consists of industry veterans, many of which have direct research, trading and banking experience at J.P Morgan, Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank and an educational background at the London School of Economics.
Our CTO and Technical architect have around 40 years of combined experience and they are technology geeks. During their career, they have lead and implemented multi-million dollar and mission critical financial systems. Their expertise with both enterprise and financial trading systems is helping SPECTRE’s long-term technology vision.
Smart contract development is being handled by an experienced solidity developer who previously worked in the Pillar project which raised around $25 million in their Token Sale.
7. How is SPECTRE different from current prediction market platforms?
The current prediction market platforms like Augur, Gnosis and Stox are marketplaces. Meaning that, they don’t provide liquidity and bettors will have to bet against each other. For this model to work the platforms should have hundreds of thousands of users. Furthermore, some of these existing platforms also offer the option to users to become book makers, and create and fund the betting events. Again this model will get traction among book makers only if there are hundreds of thousands of users in these platforms.
SPECTRE’s model uses a tokenized and decentralized liquidity pool. Traders will be trading against this liquidity pool and they can start trading from day one without worrying whether or not the platform has enough traders to back their trades, as there will be the liquidity pool there to trade against.
8. Other Differentiators
We could have launched our Token Sale during December 2016 just with a whitepaper and website. Instead we decided against it and focused on building a product which is rich in features and never seen before. These features include detailed performance analytics, emotion control and early warning engine. As a result, SPECTRE isn’t just a concept but a platform in public alpha stage and ready for everyone to enter and try out. We will be releasing public beta with Testnet integration by December 2017 and the final product launch with Mainnet integration is scheduled for March 2018.
SPECTRE will also be opening the decentralised liquidity pool to third party sports, event betting and gaming platforms. This will be done through a D-App Store and it will be a game changer as the platform developers won’t need to worry about liquidity problems, but they can focus on building great gaming and betting apps.
We hope reading this has offered valuable insight into SPECTRE and the reasons why we are adamant to see it through. It is a revolutionary project with a real-world use case and can bring transparency and fairness to a big part of the financial industry.
We are looking forward to welcoming you to our journey!
Warning: The information contained in this post is not a solicitation to invest. All ICO participants should carefully go over all the risks described in the whitepaper on the token-sale website. The token-sale is strictly closed to U.S citizens and a range of technical measures are in place to ensure citizens from restricted regions (as outlined in the token-sale T&C), including the U.S, will not be able to contribute.
