A DIY guide

A preamble

We have embarked on our crypto journey a little over a year ago. As everyone, who have come into the space, we were equally fascinated by the technology and its promise and annoyed by the complex user experience across the whole eco-system.

The whole community seemed to understand that UI/UX issues were impeding the speed of crypto adoption and without fixing them it was impossible to move forward. Numerous articles were written and podcasts recorded.

— Ok, someone is going to fix this soon enough.

So we thought and, as most of the other teams in the space, started building cutting-edge tech for tomorrow.

A year passed.

One beautiful September morning I had just started my usual crypto routine. You know, the one where you check the prices on Coinmarketcap, then go to a couple of news sites to figure out what happened and why, then log in to one of the exchanges to sell one asset, then into the next to buy some more of another, then go to your portfolio tracking app (Excel in my case) to record the changes…

Oh, wait! That’s not true — I had realized that I had quit updating my portfolio spreadsheet a while ago. I had done it regularly for quite a while — you know, when everything had been going up, I had actually enjoyed doing it every day. But then things became not that fun anymore, plus I had become quite an active user — meaning multiple wallets and almost a dozen of exchange accounts — and it had simply started taking too long to keep track of things.

And then it struck me — no one had fixed it, it became only worse!

Everyone is so busy building new blockchains with zillions TPS and super-fast decentralized exchanges that we have completely forgotten that UI/UX issues are impeding the speed of crypto adoption and without fixing them it is impossible to move forward.

Expecto Patronum, anyone?

Then I sat back, closed my eyes and started dreaming: if I had a magic wand, what would I fix?

1. I want all crypto products I use to look and feel like Robinhood. Or Medium. Or an original iPhone, if you know what I mean. At the very least like Coinbase or Blockchain.com
2. I want to use the same crypto apps and have the same experience when I am at my desktop or on the couch with my smartphone
3. I want to know what is happening to my entire portfolio in real time without having to input every transaction manually
4. I want to be able to buy or sell any cryptocurrency from a single intuitive interface. I hate captchas: I hate crappy pictures, I hate storefronts, I hate bicycles, cars, and traffic lights. I hate putting pieces of the puzzle in place in 1.4s and beating 98% of the users. I hate creepy, google-translated interfaces. I hate keeping five exchange tabs open. I hate trading on mobile.
5. I want to have all the little features I need in one place. Market prices, news, alerts — you do not need a separate app for each of them. Less is more.
6. Finally, I want app developers to understand that I actually am human: when I check market prices and see a hundred-rows table with 12-digit numbers — my eyes hurt. And my head. I do appreciate that you are letting me know that the BTC market cap is exactly $111,150,991,147 and not $111,150,991,148. Or do I? No, in fact, I do not. I COULD NOT CARE LESS!!! Please, please, just make it $111.15B.

A to-do list

Unfortunately, I did not have my wand with me that day. That is why there were only two strategic choices left: to keep dreaming or DIY.

After a very short discussion with the team, the new Cryptto was born.

Cryptto will make all my wishes come true, and more!

CRYPTTO.TRADE

• Single interface to send orders to any exchange you have an account on
• No need to struggle with multiple logins and constantly open exchange tabs
• Trade at your desk or on the go — seamless web and mobile experience
• Trader protection — avoid costly fat-finger mistakes
• Unified order types: from basic to the most complex. Learn once and use them on any exchange

CRYPTTO.PORTFOLIO

• Automatically track your entire portfolio
• Connect all your exchange accounts via API
• Add all your wallets by simply copying your public addresses
• Powerful analytics
• Intuitive interface

CRYPTTO.PRICES

• Check real-time and historical prices of any cryptocurrency
• See details of any asset: project info, volumes, supply, etc.
• Create watchlist to follow the ones you are interested in
• Get the latest news: general market and asset-specific
• Set up smart price alerts

And the best thing about Cryptto — it is completely free!

We will open Cryptto to the public in February 2019.

If you want a chance to try the product before that — leave us your email on our website.

Please, let us know in the comments below what other features you would like to add to the Cryptto Wish List.

We hope you are as excited as we are!

Maksim and Team Cryptto

How to fix the Terrible Crypto User Experience was originally published in Good Crypto on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Demo Platform online, upcoming Beta release & more

PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT

Cryptto Summer has been very Productive! We are progressing rapidly towards our goal to build the first iteration of our execution platform that will allow us to run several fully-automated market-neutral trading strategies competitively starting September.

We are also on track to be able to on-board first outside capital to our platform to benefit from those strategies in October as our platform enters its Beta release stage.

The first strategies, launched on our Beta platform, will be the ones we described in our Alpha platform preview.

The first users of our Beta platform will be our pre-sale participants.

We are also finalizing the front-end and the UI of our Beta platform. In fact, you can already browse the pre-production version under a Demo account. It should give you a good idea of the UI and main product features that will be available to Beta platform users.

BROWSE DEMO PLATFORM

Any constructive feedback is more than welcome!

TEAM

We are pleased to welcome a new Advisor to our team — Danny Yuan, who will be advising us on Trading Strategies.

Danny is a brilliant Data Scientist, having graduated from MIT with a concentration in Machine Learning. He has been successfully developing data-driven crypto trading strategies for some time now, and we strongly believe he will prove to be a great addition to our already strong strategy development capabilities.

COMMUNITY AND MARKETING

Having been almost entirely focused on product development, we are now beginning to ramp up our community building and marketing efforts in anticipation of our Beta platform launch and the Public Pre-sale.

We are pleased to announce that Cryptto was designated as one of Cryptonite’s Top Private Crypto Projects for 2018.

This gives us exposure to a distinguished pool of top crypto investors and also an opportunity for our co-founders to present at the upcoming Cryptonite World Conference in San-Francisco on September 26–27th.

Denis and Maksim will share the stage with such renowned investors as Bart Stephens from Blockchain Capital, Michael Arrington from Arrington XRP Capital, Kavita Gupta from Consensys Ventures, and prominent projects like Quantstamp and NuCypher.

AIRDROP QUIZ

Our Airdrop Quiz is well underway. As was previously stated, we will close the Quiz once we receive 20,000 Quiz submissions.

Do not miss your chance to get 100 free TTO tokens and a chance to win a free monthly subscription to our platform.

If you have not taken the Quiz already, make sure you have read our Whitepaper, sign into your account on our website, and hit the green button!

Please, don’t forget that you need to become and remain a member of our Telegram channel for the whole duration of the Airdrop Quiz to be eligible to receive your TTO tokens.

Cryptto Progress Update — September’18 was originally published in Good Crypto on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Excerpt 1 from the Cryptto Whitepaper

In this article we are going to explore the market of professional crypto trading: define its boundaries, structure, and key characteristics, compare it to traditional asset classes trading and analyze how it is likely to evolve going forward.

Professional trading of cryptocurrencies is a part of a much larger market of investing in publicly traded assets or claims on assets. This large market can be broken down into investing in traditional public markets (stocks, futures, options, etc.) and the crypto markets (cryptocurrencies, tokens, etc.).

Here is a diagram¹ illustrating the “universe” of public markets investing: both traditional and crypto.

The first divide here is between the active and passive investment management. It arises from the cornerstone theoretical question of whether the financial markets are efficient or not.

If, as was argued by the Nobel prize winner Eugene Fama² in 1970, markets indeed are efficient, meaning that the asset prices always incorporate and reflect all available information, then one cannot “beat the market” by actively selecting under- or overpriced assets to buy or sell.

In this case, one’s goals should be diversification (to diversify away the risk of the individual assets), asset allocation (to achieve the desired risk/return profile), and trading costs minimization (through low turnover). For most investors, it’d mean investing in a broad-market index (index fund, to be precise)³.

However, empirical evidence points to the fact that the financial markets are often far from efficient. Lack of liquidity, market fragmentation, incomplete information, and a number of behavioral factors can and regularly do create market inefficiencies. In fact, Eugene Fama himself, by the time he got his Nobel prize in 2013 for his 1970s work on efficient markets, has basically proven their inefficiency⁴.

Market inefficiencies are even more pronounced in the nascent crypto markets where they can often be spotted with a naked eye, creating ample opportunities for the active investment strategies to earn healthy risk-adjusted returns.

The key divide within the active investment management category is between the investing per se and trading or speculation.

“Investing is buying an asset, or claim on an asset, based on an estimate of the fundamental value of the underlying asset. The investor buys the asset because he feels the price is below the asset’s value or that the price will increase because the asset’s value is increasing at a rate that will produce an attractive return. The value is determined by the cash flows the asset will provide its owners over the asset’s useful life”⁵. Investing necessarily deals with the longer time horizons (months to years) to realize its returns.

Trading or speculating (we believe these terms should be used interchangeably) “is buying or selling an asset based solely on expected price changes without regard to either the asset’s fundamental value or changes in that value”⁶.

Trading/speculating, in turn, could be either professional or casual/amateur. It is the proliferation of the latter that is responsible for the often-negative connotation of the word “speculation”.

Professional traders “have extensive experience, have developed key insights and judgment, and are systematic and disciplined in their strategies”⁷. It means that professional traders clearly understand the edge they have, the reasons they have it, and the conditions that are necessary to systematically realize it. Professional trading is dealing with short time horizons — from microseconds to days and weeks, very rarely months.

Two gravest mistakes many inexperienced participants in financial markets make are speculating while thinking that they are investing and considering themselves professional traders while clearly lacking the expertise and discipline to be one.

At CRYPTTO, we concentrate on the intraday, ultra-short-term trading. Speed is our home turf, we have been perfecting our strategies and technology trading US equities, options, and futures for over a decade, and everything we do is optimized for speed by design. We fall into the professional trading bucket — behind our every strategy is a clear trading thesis that is extensively tested before going into production, and then is re-tested and optimized again before scaling. We manage expected profitability and risk of our strategies tightly, we do not rely on the market’s mercy as our strategies do not make directional bets.

Now that we have defined the market we are in, let us look at key market elements and participants and try to outline major differences between the traditional and crypto markets.

Traditional public markets

By the traditional public markets here we mean one of the most developed and high-volume asset classes — US equities. It’s structure is defined in part by the legacy of its three-hundred-years’ history and in part by the ever-increasing regulations and the technological evolution.

The key gatekeepers in traditional markets are the brokerdealers. Virtually all traditional public markets orders flow through them — both from the individual investors and large institutions. Before the advent of the “discount brokers” made possible by the rise of the internet, broker-dealers made their living mainly by charging hefty transaction fees.

Fees have come down a lot recently, and now the main source of broker-dealers’ income is the so-called order flow internalization or, in other words, selling the “unsophisticated” retail order flow to the large marketmaking firms⁸ who are are happy to pay for the opportunity to trade against retail market participants. In fact, almost all non-directed orders⁹ from individual investors are sold to the wholesale market makers¹⁰ and are matched and executed outside the exchanges.

This leaves the exchanges with the predominantly “sophisticated” institutional order flow, making profitable trading there exponentially more difficult.

Trading competition within the exchanges is so vigorous, that, sending an order to the exchange, you have not more than 1 in 10 chances to trade with an actual person. 9 times out of 10 on the other side of your trade will be a market maker or a proprietary HFT firm.

Market structure and order flow for the institutional investors in traditional public markets differ only slightly. The broker-dealers are still there as the gatekeepers. The first difference is that there is a lot less internalization of the order flow happening as the wholesale market makers are less interested in buying it¹¹.

The second difference is that the key issue for the institutional buyers and sellers is to hide or mask their intention of posting a large order so that the market makers/HFTs won’t jump ahead, effectively increasing institution’s trading costs. This leads to the extensive employment of execution algorithms, breaking down orders between exchanges, dark pools etc. by both the institutions themselves and the brokers at their direction. Whether they succeed or not in doing this is beyond the scope of this discussion (hint: not really).

Crypto markets

Market structure and order flow for the institutional investors in crypto markets is basically the same as for the retail investors, just the order flow itself is skewed in favor of the OTC trading desks and away from DEXes.

There are 3 major buckets into which the differences between the crypto and traditional market structure fall.

Bucket 1 — differences that appeared because the crypto markets were developed from scratch with no legacy customs and regulations.

This bucket includes the absence of the broker-dealers and the clearing houses.

It means that the order management is basically performed by the investors themselves, and the settlement is done either by the exchanges or by the smart contracts in case of DEXes.

It is difficult to say whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing — there are arguments for both. And it is entirely possible that the institutions performing functions similar to the current broker-dealers and the clearing houses will develop (in fact, they already do). However, it is hard to imagine that these institutions will ever become so all-encompassing as it is the case in the traditional markets.

Bucket 2 — differences that developed because of the specific properties of blockchain and crypto technologies and cannot be recreated in the traditional markets.

First and foremost, this bucket consists of the decentralized exchanges and the ability to securely and efficiently perform P2P exchange transactions enabled by the smart contracts.

Decentralized exchanges are almost unsuitable for the professional trading at the moment due to lack of speed, low liquidity, and high transactions costs. However, we clearly see this situation changing as the industry and the technology develops.

We might even say that there is a high chance that the decentralized exchanges are the future of the cryptocurrency markets.

Bucket 3 — differences that exist because the crypto markets are still in the early stages and which will inevitably disappear as they develop.

The main difference here is the much smaller share of the market makers and HFTs in the total transaction volume. It is hard to estimate with any type of precision, but our best guess is that still over half of all transactions on centralized exchanges and around 90% on DEXes are natural order flow transactions. And if we disregard instances when the cryptocurrencies are traded just in order to increase the total trading volume of a token or an exchange — the natural order flow transactions’ share is even higher.

Thus, compared to the traditional markets, the exchange order flow is still relatively unsophisticated, and the competition levels in systematic intraday trading are low. However, that is bound to change.

Future Crypto Trading Market Developments

All new markets and industries in free economies follow pretty much the same path. Once a new market or an industry is established, companies start moving in. In the beginning, competition is low and the first movers are able to earn outsized returns for a while. However, high returns inevitably attract new entrants, unless there are firm barriers to entry (which are exceptionally rare, contrary to most people beliefs¹²).

Increased competition unavoidably drives down the returns across the industry. New players continue entering and driving down the returns until they are no longer above average (above their cost of capital, to be precise), making new entry unattractive.

All industries without barriers to entry inescapably end up with a high level of competition, where only a few most efficient players remain truly profitable (earning returns higher than their cost of capital). And true barriers to entry are very difficult to come by: first mover advantage, economies of scale, high capital requirements, and even proprietary technology — the usual things that come to mind — are not true barriers to entry, as they can and will be overcome, provided the expected returns are high enough¹³.

That is exactly what has happened with intraday trading industry in the traditional markets.

Fifteen or so years ago in traditional markets, you would be able to execute arbitrage opportunities manually — you just had to type fast. News propagated over minutes – you had plenty of time to react and still make a profitable trade. The assets had wider spreads. In a single-dealer market such as NYSE, you typically were able to deduce specialist’s intentions and trade along with him. Index and ETF arbitrage was relatively easy — both deviated from their fair value regularly.

As the technological evolution made electronic trading possible, the “easy money” to be made led to the proliferation of quantitative/algorithmic/high-frequency trading firms — hundreds if not thousands of them popped up on the Wall Street.

Ever increasing competition inevitably changed the market: manual arbitrage opportunities are long gone, news propagates over tiny fractions of a second, spreads are minuscule, institutions and market makers mask and hide their orders, indexes and ETFs hardly ever deviate from their fair value.

Thus, many of the strategies that you had been able to execute manually 15 years ago simply do not exist anymore and for most of what is left you’d need a top-tier infrastructure, systems, technology and back-office stack to compete.

But even that might not be enough — exactly as predicted for the industry with no defendable barriers to entry, only the most efficient players survive once the competition catches up. During the recent years, the intraday trading industry saw a wave of bankruptcies and consolidation. Now, only a handful of the largest and a small amount of the most efficient small players are left.

In crypto, the current situation clearly resembles that of the traditional markets 15 years ago.

Professional systematic trading in crypto markets certainly does provide outsized returns at the moment. Just look at how the news of the recent addition of Zcash to Gemini propagated:

This is May 14th, 2018 when Gemini announced the addition of Zcash to its trading pairs that led to a spike in Zcash’s trading volume and price. Each candle on the graph represents a 5 minutes interval. As you can see, even if you reacted 15 minutes after the announcement was made, you could still make a 10–20% return from your trade.

Those timeframes and returns are unthinkable in the traditional markets. Here is a recent example of equity traders reacting to Amazon’s earnings:

The first trades had happened microseconds after the press-release became available and the trading opportunity was gone in under 3 minutes.

That is why crypto markets already do and will continue to attract new entrants.

In crypto, there are even fewer barriers to entry than there were in the traditional markets. Moreover, as more and more professional traditional markets players move to crypto once the initial institutional inertia is overcome and the regulatory environment is clear enough, their skills and experience will provide them with the immediate advantage.

Continuously increasing competition in crypto trading, as in any other industry, will inevitably drive down average returns and, eventually, push the weakest players into unprofitability. In crypto it will take much less than 15 years — the manual arbitrage in crypto markets is virtually over already, and it took less than a year.

To remain competitive, crypto traders will need to evolve and seek a totally different level of expertise, infrastructure, and resources.

The CRYPTTO platform will provide exactly that.

This article is the first in the series based on the CRYPTTO Whitepaper. Follow us not to miss the rest or simply download the Whitepaper.

Footnotes:

¹ This diagram and its subsequent analysis heavily draw on the work and thinking of Columbia Business School Value Investing professors Paul Johnson and Tano Santos;

² https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1540-6261.1970.tb00518.x

³ Buying an index fund can also make sense even if you do not believe in market efficiency — in case you do not have access to active strategies that can consistently outperform the markets after accounting for all fees and trading costs. In fact, in traditional markets, buying an index fund would probably be by far the best investment strategy for most of the unsophisticated individual investors;

⁴ https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0304405X93900235

⁵ ⁶ ⁷ https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/fundamental-value-paul-johnson/

⁸ That’s what made possible the creation of the famed “zero fees” brokers, the “robinhoods” of the world;

⁹ Orders, for which the sender did not specify execution venue (i.e. NYSE or NASDAQ);

¹⁰ Source: Bank of America Merrill Lynch’s Market Structure News (March 2018);

¹¹ The explanation of why they do not want to pay for the institutional order flow is beyond the scope of this whitepaper. But, in short, it has to do with the regulations that oblige to execute the internalized orders at the best market bid or ask (across all US markets) at the moment of internalization. For small retail orders it means that the market maker will earn the spread minus the internalization fee with virtually zero risk. With the large institutional orders market makers run into the real risk of market moving against them while they still hold this large order in their inventory;

¹² For an excellent discussion of the barriers to entry and competition in general we suggest reading Competition Demystified by Bruce Greenwald, which has heavily influenced our thinking and the ideas, presented in this article;

¹³ Not to waste time and space here, we invite you to read the Competition Demystified by Bruce Greenwald to clear any doubts you may have.

Trading crypto vs. traditional asset classes was originally published in Good Crypto on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

During the last week of May, as per our Roadmap, we have launched in production mode two fully-automated structural arbitrage strategies. Currently, they are trading our own capital. These and a few other strategies will become available to our pre-sale participants in August and to all CRYPTTO platform users after its public launch this fall.

Our inter-exchange arbitrage strategy was designed to take advantage of differences in the price of a single asset pair on several exchanges. It is currently trading BTC/USD on GDAX and Bitfinex but will be scaled to all liquid instruments and major exchanges.

Our intra-exchange triangular arbitrage strategy is exploiting price discrepancies of three instruments on a single exchange. At the moment it is trading BTC/ETH/USD on GDAX, but will be scaled to all liquid instruments and major exchanges in the near future as well.

As a part of our stringent development process, our strategies are prototyped and extensively back-tested in our proprietary simulation engine using high-resolution recorded historical market data before being put into production mode.

Simulation results of both strategies are very encouraging, to say the least. See for yourself:

Inter-exchange arbitrage strategy simulation results:

This strategy would have returned USD 12,116 on your 2 BTC (~USD 15,400) of trading capital in 49 days. That’s 78% in 49 days. With no profits reinvestment.

Moreover, it did not have any losing days during that period, so it’d never test your nerves with a lot of red ink on the screen.

On average, it would have returned USD 247 per day, making a bit more than 10 trades daily and holding positions open between 6 seconds and 24 hours.

In case you are wondering, where is the “high-frequency” in all that — it is not in the duration of the trades (the time between entering and exiting the position), it is in the speed with which our algorithm is able to execute trading opportunities. The speed of execution allows us to minimize slippage (the difference between the price that was desired and was actually paid) and achieve real-time results that are very close to simulation.

Intra-exchange triangular arbitrage strategy simulation results:

This strategy would have earned you a USD 2,662 return on your USD 2,000 of trading capital in 48 days. That’s 133% in 48 days. With no profits reinvestment.

It did not have any losing days during that period as well — 75% of the winning days just means that 25% of the time the strategy was not able to identify available trading opportunities.

This strategy is more of a “rapid fire” type — when the opportunities arise, the positions are open and closed several times per second. To get a visual of this process, please, check the video below.

Early live trading performance confirms the simulation results — strategies in the production mode behave as expected. Now we will start scaling them across instruments and exchanges, while continuously optimizing their performance as more actual trading data comes in.

The next steps on the strategy development side are to further enhance existing strategies by adding passive position entry capabilities, finalize the production testing of our first statistical arbitrage strategy, and begin prototyping our news-driven strategies.

Passive position entry materially reduces trading costs and allows to capture the spread, significantly widening trading opportunities set of our strategies and increasing their profitability. Passive position entry is powered by our intelligent execution algorithms that will also be available as a separate product suite on our platform.

Our statistical arbitrage (StatArb) strategies exploit existing correlations between different crypto assets. They use a variety of underlying predictive signals based on time-series analysis of market data and aim at forecasting each individual trade expected return without making any bets on the general market direction.

Our statistical arbitrage strategies make a lot of small trades, which are profitable more than 50% of the time, and let the laws of statistics work its magic: with the sufficiently large number of trades the «over 50%» individual trade winning percentage translates into the daily and weekly strategy winning percentage approaching 99.9%.

Our first StatArb strategy is already running in the production mode and will be available to our pre-sale participants in August as part of our Beta platform.

An important thing to remember is that our strategies are designed to trade in your crypto exchange accounts, we never get access to your coins, so there is no additional counterparty risk for you.

The more accounts on different exchanges you have, the more and better trading opportunities our strategies will let you take advantage of. Moreover, this relation is not linear, it’s accelerating — twice number of exchange accounts expands the opportunities set more than twice.

Another important thing to keep in mind is that while the two strategies presented above may sound simple to some of you, there is more there than meets the eye. The reason they are able to deliver those returns now and will remain competitive and profitable is our deep expertise in operating and optimizing high-frequency trading strategies and our full-stack ultra-low latency trading platform running in the background.

All “easy” trading opportunities that were abundant in the crypto markets just several months ago are already gone. Just look at the simulation of our triangular arbitrage strategy returns from the beginning of 2018:

Notice the difference between the January-March and the April-May periods?

Trading opportunities are not gone-gone — that flat part of the graph, in fact, represents a 40% monthly return (481% annual) — they just became heavily competed for, as is already the case in traditional markets for many years. Similar strategies are alive and well in traditional asset classes. It’s just that most of the people reading this have no way of profiting from them since it requires access to very advanced and sophisticated trading tools.

In the crypto markets, going forward, one would need our level of expertise and technology to continue to take advantage of such opportunities.

What we offer is truly unique in the crypto space — HFT hedge fund-level technology available to any TTO token holder.

To learn more about us and the opportunities we offer, please, check our website and join our Telegram community. We will be publicly releasing our whitepaper in the coming weeks.

We will also be announcing our public pre-sale in the near future. All pre-sale participants will get an exclusive three months access to two structural arbitrage strategies scaled across major exchanges + at least one StatArb strategy. We strongly suggest you take advantage of this opportunity. Our public platform will launch this fall.

We will also be conducting an airdrop quiz after our whitepaper release — there are still some 7,000 spots open. To take part, you’ll need to create your profile on our website and join our Telegram group.

Stay tuned — we have a lot more in store for you!

Alpha preview of the CRYPTTO platform was originally published in Good Crypto on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

NLP is a crucial part of artificial intelligence. It’s getting computer systems to recognize, understand and respond intelligently to human languages to be able to communicate with people.

Applications of natural language processing are spreading today wide and fast. They range from simple tasks like spell checking and keyword search to very complex tasks, that require a really high level of human language understanding, like machine translation, dialog systems, question answering, stock trading and so on. Today many applications can already communicate with the user and help him to solve different tasks: like talking to Siri or booking a restaurant. These extremely compelling things were made possible thanks to NLP technologies. Most of us are dealing with NLP applications every day and it is becoming an integral part of modern life.

This sheer speed of NLP adoption creates an erroneous impression that the natural language processing is an easy and solved task, but it’s not. NLP is a very special kind of artificial intelligence because language is a distinctive property of human being. Humans use and understand natural language mostly intuitively. We think in terms of the language, we use words and sentences to express our thoughts, we are lying and assuming with words. Understanding human language is far more than simply knowing the meaning of every word in a language.

One of the main factors that make NLP difficult for machines is ambiguity.

Words can have different meaning depending on the context, they can change their meaning over time. How would you understand the word “JAGUAR”? Is it an animal, a car or somebody’s name?

A phrase or a sentence can be given two or more different interpretations as a result of the words arrangement: I met tall boys and girls. Are we talking about tall boys and tall girls or only boys who are tall?

Some things can be intuitively understood by a human, but are really hard to understand for a computer. For example, look at the sentence: As I reached the bank at closing time, the bank clerk helpfully shut the door in my face. Even if the computer would correctly understand every word, it might fail to understand the meaning of the whole sentence.

While communicating with each other we are relying on common sense and knowledge about how the world works. Computers don’t have that.

Take these two examples:

I ate the spaghetti with meatballs. — I ate the spaghetti with chopsticks.

Did I eat meatballs or chopsticks? Did I use meatball or chopsticks to eat?

As you see, NLP is a difficult, but exciting task. It already has a long history, many great algorithms were developed to enable computers to process and understand language. But today we are facing a new era in NLP. Tremendous amounts of spoken and written material on the web, fast computers, and advanced machine learning techniques have enabled impressive advances in all AI fields, including NLP. They yield new state-of-the-art results for most NLP tasks and make all the recent magic NLP applications possible.

Okay, that’s it for today. Next time we’ll talk about one of the most important techniques in the modern NLP called word2vec. See you ;))

NLP. What is Natural Language Processing? was originally published in Good Crypto on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

When we began researching the crypto markets in the Autumn of 2017, our biggest surprise was the sheer wealth of systematic trading opportunities the crypto markets provided. We have not seen such inefficiencies in traditional asset classes for over a decade.

Our second-biggest surprise was the almost complete absence of even basic professional trading tools that traders and investors are used to in traditional markets. That’s when the idea of the CRYPTTO platform was born.

One of the first things any professional trader needs is reliable market data delivered in a format that is easy to use. As part of our platform development, we’ve created our own real-time normalized trade data feed and decided to share it with the crypto community.

At CRYPTTO we are committed to equal access to opportunities and increased transparency of the space, as that makes any market more attractive in the long run. We believe that the today’s release is our small contribution to this cause. You are welcome to use it and share it with the fellow traders.

Our consolidated feed provides real-time normalized trade data from major crypto exchanges for free. We do not aggregate or conflate trade data in any way, only normalize the protocols and publish the trade data to subscribers. At the moment we provide access to real-time trade information for all pairs listed on Bitstamp, Bitfinex, Poloniex, Quoinex, GDAX, and Gemini. Bitmex, OKEx, and Binance to be added soon with others to follow.

The market data feed is being delivered via our C++ based low-latency market data handler capable of maintaining connections and processing all data from all crypto exchanges on a single commodity server.

For technical documentation and instructions on how to access the feed, please, visit our GitHub repository.

If you have any questions or suggestions regarding our data feed, please, join our Telegram chat.

Real-time Normalized Market Data Feed From Major Crypto Exchanges. For Free was originally published in Good Crypto on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Dear CRYPTTO community! We are announcing today our decision to airdrop up to 1,000,000 of TTO tokens to foster the community engagement and encourage adoption of our platform. To be eligible for the airdrop you will have to take a quiz designed to measure your level of awareness regarding
trading in general, crypto trading, and Cryptto platform.

We will accept up to 20,000 quiz submissions and award 10,000 airdrop slots depending on quiz results. The maximum amount of TTO airdrop per person is 100 TTO, and we will be more than happy to award all 10,000 winners with that amount! However, we reserve the right to apply a tiered approach to awarding TTO, depending on the quiz results.

We will also randomly award 1,000 trial monthly subscriptions to the base level of our platform to the 10,000 quiz winners.

To participate in the quiz you’ll have to create your profile on our website. Upon creation, you will be asked to fill in your basic info: e-mail, telegram account, country of origin, your level of trading experience (won’t affect your chances to receive the airdrop in any way), and confirm that you are
at least 18 years old. Please, make sure to provide accurate information because you might not be able to receive the airdrop otherwise. At the moment we do not have any geographical restrictions for the airdrop participants, but we reserve the right to introduce them to comply with the potential regulations.

Once the number of registered profiles reaches 20,000, the registration will be closed. The quiz might commence even before that. We will announce when the quiz will become available in our Telegram chat.

After the quiz start announcement is made you will see the link to it appear in your profile. There will be a number of multiple choice questions and several open-ended/ descriptive questions. There will be no time limit for the quiz and no restrictions on using search engines.

IMPORTANT: there will be absolutely no rush to take the quiz — once you’ve registered your profile with us, you are guaranteed a chance to participate in the quiz. The quiz will be open for at least a week after the announcement.

Once we will score the quiz, we’ll designate 10,000 winners and you will be able to check if you are one, and your TTO award size, in your profile. Trial subscription lottery results will also be available there.

All quiz winners will be invited to undergo our KYC process to be able to receive their tokens. All airdrop tokens will be distributed either together with the tokens sold in the crowdsale or directly after.

NB: you will need to remain a member of our Telegram community for the entire period to be able to receive you airdrop tokens.

Announcing CRYPTTO Airdrop Quiz was originally published in Good Crypto on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Welcome to our first progress update since we have publicly launched our site and started telling the world about ourselves.

It has been a busy couple of weeks for the CRYPTTO team (but, I guess, it will only get busier from now on).

On the marketing side, our main focus was getting listed on as many ICO trackers as possible.

We are more than happy with our progress to date — we got listed on ICObench and CoinGecko — two of the world’s top ICO trackers. Besides, we are listed on Cryptobazaar, Icomarks, Coinhills, Coinjinja, Ico-digest, Icoholder, Coinclarity, Foundico and quite a few others. Overall — not a bad start :).

In the coming weeks, we’ll continue to work with ICO trackers, but we’ll also work hard on delivering more details on our platform to you and to the wider audience to significantly increase awareness and start growing the community. We have our first interview with an ICO reviewer planned, as well as recording a video series through which you’ll get to know our team, better understand our platform features and unique advantages and, maybe, even glimpse at our development prototype (gotta convince the development team first — they are very reluctant to show the work in progress due to confidentiality concerns. It’s a habit developed over years of working in HFT).

We fully understand the need to ramp up our marketing efforts fast, but for now, we’ve got an office full of developers, traders and research scientists, and only a handful of marketing people. We promise we’ll work on that.

On the product side, we continue to expand our exchange mix by connecting to new exchanges, our research scientists continue working on new signals and strategies as we’ve collected a reasonable amount of data for them to work on, we are also in the process of rolling out our algos for trading live on more crypto exchanges. In the coming weeks, we’ll commence front-end and UI development.

As a side note for you to better understand the importance of our market data collection efforts — we have started closely looking at crypto markets in November of last year, but to date we have not found a professional crypto market data provider that can give us exactly (or even close to) what we need and are used to in traditional markets. That’s why we’ve been recording and storing the crypto market data since January this year. Having a robust market data is absolutely necessary to extract and validate any kind of meaningful signals and trading strategies.

I’d like to finish this update with a pre-announcement of our TTO tokens airdrop with more details to come sometime next week. There will be a cryptotrading quiz involved and we believe it will prove to be a great step towards building a vibrant and engaged community around our platform.

CRYPTTO’s first progress update was originally published in Good Crypto on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Please, join us on our journey to provide crypto traders with the first insitutional-grade crypto trading platform with proven sophisticated proprietary signals and strategies and fully automated ultra-low latency execution across major cryptoexchanges.

We are a team with combined quantitative trading experience of over 100 years across major traditional asset classes. We have intimate understanding of market microstructure and proven track record of developing profitable trading strategies and world-class ultra-low latency execution platforms under different market regimes.

Please, visit our site @ www.cryptto.io to learn more about our vision.

In this blog we will not only provide updates on our platform development, but also regularly post educational materials, explaining the complex and obscure world of high-frequency quantitative trading in simple terms.

First institutional-grade crypto trading platform — cryptto.io was originally published in Good Crypto on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.