One of the Top 20 AI Blockchain projects — Numerai

LiveTiles brought to my attention 20 AI Blockchain projects through a great infographic.
Numerai is one that I profiled in 2017 backed by Fred Ehrsam, Joey Krug, Juan Benet, Olaf Carlson-Wee and Union Square Ventures.

Numerai is creating a meta-model from all the Machine Learning (ML) algorithms developed by “the crowd” with cryptographic data. Numerai aims to offer a platform that generates alpha in a novel way. It wants to structure a rewarding mechanism for its traders that not only eliminates the typical competitive and adversarial behavior between them but actually, penalizes them.

The Big Hairy Audacious Goal of Numerai: network effects in Quant trading — Efi Pylarinou

Numerai is a unique venture. It remains the only hedge fund built on blockchain and using ML and data science in a novel way. The novelty lies in changing the incentive and compensation structure of the fund manager.

Numerai launched on 21st February 2017, 1 million Numeraire tokens (NMR) that were airdropped to 12,000 anonymous scientists. The NMR token was awarded to the thousands of data scientists for creating successful machine-learning based predictive models. Once the data scientists are confident of the predictive ability of their model, they can stake their NMR and earn additional NMR if they are correct.

Numerai involves a staking mechanism.

In March 2019, Numerai reported that $10miilion had been rewarded up to date. Thereafter, NMR tokens were awarded as rewards to users of its platform. Bear in mind, that if a participant stakes NMR and their model doesn’t perform, the staked tokens are burnt.

According to Numerai, the NMR token is one of the most used ERC20 tokens. By end of 2018 reporting 25,000 stakes of…