In the past, we’ve explained the utility and the vision of Numerai to you. Over the past quarter, however, new developments have emerged regarding the future of the project, especially with regards to its’ usage of Artificial Intelligence technologies.
First, back in October, the Numerai team announced the creation of a protocol called Erasure, which it claims will position its’ native token as the “cryptocurrency for the entire hedge fund industry.”
The chances of this occurring hinge directly on the successful achievement of its’ goal of providing the go-to marketplace for hedge funds and individual or institutional investors to exchange meaningful data. Here, by meaningful data, we mean that which is actionable for hedge funds.
In other words, once they receive a reliable tip that Apple stocks are about to move a certain way, then they can easily act on it, while the tipster is also compensated for his or her efforts in Numeraire tokens.
At this point, you might be thinking: wait a moment, isn’t that what Numerai has always done?
The answer is yes and no.
First, keep in mind that Erasure aims to be a decentralized data marketplace for predictions. This means the Numerai team will be phased out of the process, if they have not been already.
Considering this, the chief place of AI should be in facilitating the continued evolution of the future “Erasure marketplace,” which will be where all of the transactions mentioned above will take place. To be more precise, this means that Numerai’s AI systems could be largely focused on taking in and crunching the horde of data that will eventually flood the marketplace.
The reason why this could be the case is quite simple. AIs can already analyze data and build reliable models from it exponentially faster than humans can. They don’t have to stop to eat. They don’t have to stop to sleep. In a general sense, they don’t have to take any sort of break.
As the Erasure marketplace moves into its’ fourth month of being live, keep two key performance indicators in mind. Firstly, it is the same Numerai marketplace that it has always been, but it is now open to anyone who is interested in participating in it, instead of just data science teams. Secondly, any chance that it has of persisting over the long-term depends directly on it reaching daily user numbers that matter.
At this juncture, that likely means outpacing most of the existing Dapps that depend on the Ethereum network’s main chain. Over the next year, expect us to continue to keep you informed on this saga, but until then, you can track Erasure’s performance here.
Resources:
https://medium.com/numerai/numerai-reveals-erasure-unstoppable-peer-to-peer-data-feeds-4fbb8d92820a
https://www.coindesk.com/no-ico-hedge-fund-numerai-releases-blockchain-token-without-funding
