Numerai Ramps Up Its’ Efforts to Launch Erasure

What if an AI-driven hedge fund held the key to truly monetizing data at a large scale? In past posts, we’ve introduced you to Erasure, which aims to be the world’s first effective, decentralized marketplace for data. While you may have heard of a multitude of other projects who have tried and failed to do the same thing, Erasure bears mentioning once again because of the traction it has been getting.

On Thursday, CoinDesk broke the news that Numerai had closed a new fundraising round to the tune of $11 million. The striking part about this is that all of it was reportedly done in their native NMR tokens. Simultaneously, the same article mentions that the Numerai platform only has about 1,000 stakers per week. If you remember what its’ general utility is, then you remember exactly how important stakers are in this case.

To recap, Numerai is basically a powerful Ethereum Dapp, which people can use to access a blockchain-based hedge fund that improves as people add more predictions and therefore, data to it. The crux of the network is the Artificial Narrow Intelligence system that takes in this data and then uses it to improve its’ trades and overall return on investment.

Despite the fact that Numerai only has about 1,000 weekly users, it appears to be one of the most successful Dapps to date, though mainly by long-term metrics. Since it is a hedge fund, it is logical to conclude that this does not necessarily equal success, since the trading strategies of hedge funds can widely vary. Generally, some focus more on the long-term hold while others trade frequently to establish their positions.

Even so, the Numerai team is determined to launch their new, ideally decentralized marketplace, called Erasure as soon as they possibly can. Thursday’s announcement of their new funding round included the news that the bulk of the funds will be used for expanding the team that is working on Erasure to make sure it is launched as it is meant to be launched.

More specifically, this means that Numerai’s leadership wants to be certain that the engineers working on Erasure can make sure it supports a variety of different markets, so that especially its’ users have as many options as possible in terms of what type of data they can upload, buy, and sell.

If the end result of these efforts is hard for you to imagine, then you are surely not alone in this respect. Still, it may help to imagine an online platform which anyone can use to attempt to predict just about anything. The catch is: they not only have to stake Numerai tokens on the predictions they make, once a prediction is posted, it cannot be altered. At the same time, Erasure will allow its’ users to both commit to their prediction and not reveal it until they are paid for it.

As Richard Craib says in his Medium piece on the subject, if someone is significantly less than perfect with their predictions, everyone will be able to see it. Lending credence to the chance that their efforts with Erasure will succeed is the fact that Paradigm and Placeholder Ventures have been outspoken in their support of the project.

Fred Ehrsahm, who is Paradigm’s co-founder, publicly stated his belief in Numerai’s ability to follow through on their promises related to helping people make money off of their data. Ehrsahm’s opinion also carries a significant amount of weight in the crypto community and beyond, mainly because he was one of Coinbase’s co-founders. Therefore, it stands to reason that other big names in venture capital might follow the example that Paradigm and Placeholder have set, over time.

Generally, if Erasure garners the same level of trust as Numerai or more, then it just might be the first decentralized data marketplace that actually turns a profit for its’ users. At the same time, it should be noted that any project looking to do so will need to find a way to circumvent the siloing of most of the world’s data that has been going on for years in Silicon Valley, while still creating consistent value for its’ users.

Erasure is going to have to be truly innovative, to say the least. However matters turn out, expect us to keep you informed and until more developments come to light, check out some of our resources below.