Daily Bit #96: May The Interviews Be With You

Morning folks,

May this be the final May 4th pun that you see until next year. We hope that everyone is capping off their week on a splendid, and cooler, note. New York’s weather was a leading indicator of the crypto market performance this week. temperatures shot up 40 degrees since Sunday, and roughly $60 billion of USD has pumped into the market since the day after. Nothing gets a sweat out like a potential road to recovery.

Anyways, enough of the banter — we’re dropping three interviews for you today. That lineup is as follows:

• DarpalRating, a crypto asset rating organization founded in May 2017.
• Brett Richey, CEO of Blitz Predict, a line aggregator for prediction markets and sportsbooks.
• Bobby Axelrod, cryptocurrency trader and admin at OneX Capital.

Several questions from each interview are shared below and the full posts can be found on our blog. We felt that this would be an interesting way to close out the week while shedding light on distinct personalities in the market. Plus, it’s hard to say no to a pun.

Hope you enjoy — see you back on Monday for a rant on decentralized exchanges.

P.S. — Big congrats to Wanchain for achieving #Unicorn status ($1 Billion market cap) in 7 months!

DarpalRating (@DarpalRating)

What are the strengths of your team? Weaknesses?

Our team consists of 20 persons. 10 of us have Master’s or above degree, 8 of us have studied abroad. Every one of the team has a specific duty. Our product line includes crypto rating, code auditing, index, due diligence, rankings list and more in development.

We will build our advantage on top of our big data platform. Apart from our domestic business, we also expand our overseas market. We want to build an international community and ecology.

Are there any other valuation methodologies currently being explored in the space that Darpal finds interesting?

Our rating is essentially a quantitative and qualitative measurement of the chance of success of the projects. But till now, on how the chance of success is defined and based on which how do investors make their portfolio are barely mentioned by any rating service including ourselves.

The blockchain is still in its early phase, and in this phase, the exploration in the evaluating a blockchain project is critical. It’s very difficult to get a breakthrough. What we can do now is to improve the synergy on the basis of collecting more data, evaluate more projects. We wish to contribute more to evolving our valuation models and rating metrics.

What is Darpal’s outlook for the industry in 6 months? 12 months? 18?

The second quarter of 2018 will be very interesting. Many projects will have to elect their nodes according to the roadmap. Whether it’s a testnet, mainnet, actual product or testing data, it’s time for the projects to deliver some actual results.

For the projects that have been steadily developing, the coming Q2 is their time to deliver and harvest reputation, and they will have their advantaged position in their own vertical. For projects that failed to fulfill their unrealistic ambition, they will have to alter their goal or lose their competition.

Brett Richey (@BrettRichey)

Can you tell us about your background and what led you to create BlitzPredict?

I’m a former poker pro that went into Daily Fantasy Sports (DFS) to build a consumer-friendly mobile app for FanDuel and DraftKings users. Our ultimate goal was preparing for legalized sports betting in the U.S. but when the DFS market cooled off we decided to head into the blockchain to start building our platform without waiting for legislation to pass.

How is BlitzPredict different than traditional sports books and online gambling sites?

We aren’t a sportsbook or gambling site ourselves — we provide information and tools for sports bettors and esports bettors. We aggregate lines from throughout the industry to ensure our users always get the best odds available.

All predictions made on BlitzPredict are recorded to the blockchain and time-stamped against true market odds. This means there is no way for someone to lie about or otherwise forge their record — we want to bring truth and transparency to a notoriously opaque industry.

What is your opinion on Bitcoin and other crypto assets? Where does BlitzPredict see short-term (1–2 years) applications of blockchain technology arising? Long-term (5–10 years)?

I’m not a trader but I’m bullish on Bitcoin. I agree with the general consensus that most projects are overvalued right now, but some will create tremendous value in the long run. I think there’s too much hype around what *could* be built in the future, as opposed to what’s actually achievable right now. We are focused on our initial use case of recording predictions to the blockchain, time-stamped against true market odds.

I’m very bullish on the long-term prospects for blockchain technology and I think there are going to be some big consumer apps to come out of this industry. I’m looking forward to the technology advancing — our project will benefit by the industry getting stronger and more efficient and we look forward to being positive contributors to the ecosystem.

Bobby Axelrod (@OneX_Capital)

When did you first learn about Bitcoin? How long did it take before you were able to work in the industry full time?

A few of my friends in Computer Science invested in Bitcoin and I took it upon myself to dig deeper on the subject. After countless hours of research, I grew more and more in love with the technology and decided to go full time with it. Now I trade full time at a cryptocurrency hedge fund and lead a group of over 5,000 day traders at OneX.

People don’t discuss the political implications of blockchain enough. According to FundStrat’s Thomas Lee, 97% of millennials have a distrust of the central banking system and it is for good reason. The 2008 financial crisis saw the US government use tax dollars to bail out private banks that were considered “Too Big to Fail”. The result of which saw the birth of a new digital currency that could not be gamed and is purely governed by the laws of mathematics.

We are entering an interesting period where the global economy is not anchored by gold but instead by fiat currencies. There is no intrinsic or reference value in the current monetary system where money is printed as needed. I see Bitcoin as a movement against this system and as a disruptive innovation bigger than the invention of the internet. Everyone can be their own bank by utilizing a trustless digital currency and decentralized ledger of transactions.

Walk us through a normal day. How much time do you spend identifying trade setups? Research? Study?

First thing I do when I log on is open up a bitcoin chart and check the twitter feed for crypto news. Afterwards I will scan through my short list of alts to find any trade setups. I dedicate at least a couple of hours every day for research and analysis in order to stay ahead of the game.

Last week, Fundstrat introduced five new crypto market indexes for each sector (Currency, Platforms, Privacy, Exchange, Stablecoins). What sector are you most bullish about? Does another sector come to mind that was not mentioned by Fundstrat?

I am most bullish on currency platforms / protocols that have killer Decentralized Applications and solve the issue of scalability better than Bitcoin can. No one knows if Bitcoin will retain its number one spot forever due to its shortcomings. First mover advantage will not be good enough if Bitcoin cannot scale, which leaves the door wide open to competition on this front.

Where do you think the industry is going to be in 2 years? 5 years?

While I think crypto is here to stay, I think many of the altcoins we see today are not going to be around for long. Many traders are flipping these scam coins in order to accumulate more Bitcoin, no one really wants to hold onto a utility token or alt that doesn’t have a network effect comparable to Bitcoin. Other than that, I can easily see crypto hitting a multi trillion-dollar market cap after institutional investors start to get involved.