Generating Alpha Together by David Utro

It's yours.

Thank you so much, Chris. Hey, everybody. Uh, welcome to my talk. Thank you for attending the three of you. [laughter] I appreciate you being here and live stream.

Oh, where's the camera? It's uh over there. Hi, live stream. I hope you're having a great time enjoying EF DevCon. Um, yeah, welcome to my talk.

Uh, my name is David. I'm the one of the leaders at Santiment. I lead BD, community development, communications, strategy, and today I'm going to be talking about generating alpha together. It's our vision for helping investors work together to gain an edge. Uh before I get into the thesis of the talk, uh I want to introduce you to who we are.

Uh we are Santiment. We've been around since 2017. We were one of the first 10 ICOs actually. So we are in fact Ethereum OGs. Uh we're a major data provider for people interested in behavioral analysis of the crypto markets.

Uh it's a very niche, very important thing for investors and we love helping people. So we care about these people. So we care about retail but you know retail is a little bit of a derogatory term in our industry. Uh we care about them. You know they feel it the most when they get wrecked.

They feel it the most when they succeed. you know, we see that they have the most net positivity, the most quality of life increases, and they're some of the most important they're they are probably one of the most important classes of customers for our industry because they end up becoming huge evangelists or huge actually enemies of the industry depending on their outcomes. So, we want to help them gain back a bit of an edge in the market that's dominated by sophisticated actors. So in doing that uh in that ethos in the spirit of that ethos uh we created Sandbase. It's a API it's an app uh we cover over two and um like two and a half or more thousand assets uh 14 blockchains now thousands of metrics uh million features and tools.

I'll show you the screenshots in a second uh and lots of data. I think I heard the number we have something like over um like 80 or 90 terabytes or even 100 terabytes of data over the years. So we have a lot. Um this is the app uh you know we have all of the quality of life stuff for a trader to get to use on a daily basis to see a snapshot of the markets. So not only do we work on social data, we also have all the regular stuff.

We have charts, prices, RSI, all the typical metrics. We have um we have screeners. We have infographics for your screener, you know, for your list of assets that you might want to look at. Uh we have uh a ton of social trend tools and social tools. For example, our latest hit feature has been trending stories.

People have been uh constantly thanking us for helping them see a good snapshot of what's the most popular thing happening in the space right now. And actually, it's a great way to find trading opportunities. Um, so a little bit about our data. Of course, uh, our main thing is social data. We really, really, really love the idea of behavioral analysis of the crypto markets.

You know, what people are doing and how people are thinking often impacts the price a lot more than the fundamentals of the project. I know because I learned that the hard way. uh [laughter] and I'm sure many of you might be guilty of investing in uh fundamentals and not actually hype or like what people think. So, you know, we care a lot about social data. We also record uh developer data, uh onchain data, market data, which is all the regular financial data.

So, we are kind of like the all-in-one place to go to if you're an investor. And we've this is what the talk is about. So, we've been experimenting uh by building tools that try to help smaller crypto investors. Um, and we want them to also generate alpha together. So, let me talk a little bit about each tool.

So, this is actually within Sandbase. It's our community tab. It's a feed for charts, screeners, insights, and more. Uh, so Sandbase not only is a data analytics platform, it's a little bit of a social media site actually. you can uh generate uh a reputation for doing really great analysis over the years and uh you could share pretty much anything that you create on Sandbase with your peers.

Uh we also have San R which is a trading simulator and reputation builder. So you can analyze and strategize via Sandbase and then the idea is if you don't have money to trade um and or you're scared of trading you could practice, you can compete and you can monetize your predictions on Senar. So, we actually have uh every week a trading competition, a paper trading competition, and we reward the winners with uh with tokens. So, it's a really fun way to get involved with the community, practice your trading skills, um and actually monetize them if you have proven performance. Uh you could actually sell keys and create private predictions.

So, there's a little bit of uh fun uh incentive there to do well. We also created uh an app called Sanitizer. This is for um tracking your favorite or least favorite Kos on X.com. Uh basically, you could take their tweets and you could preserve them on a blockchain.

That way, if they ever delete them, you could say, "No, man. You stop bullshitting me." Like, I I see what you said a month ago. You know, and actually uh as our users add more and more tweets of Kos over time, it develops uh like a reputation score. And this is V1 of the the app.

We actually intend to automate a lot of the uh a lot of the like uh prediction identification of tweets and logging them and and making sure you get a more accurate representation of the K's performance over time, right? Like maybe one K is 80% of the time, right? Maybe another one is like 80% of the time full of crap. So sanitizer, it's a little bit about that. Uh Sansi, this is a this is actually what we have.

Uh it's a proof of concept. This is what we have demoing at our booth on our tablet. Uh so the idea is it's a feed where if you're a crypto investor uh you know retail person who you know is trying to figure out what's happening in the market. What we did is we scrape all the Twitter data and we identify the predictions and we give them to you on one feed. So we help take away the noise of Twitter if that's where your primary source of information is and we distill it down to just the predictions and there's kind of a game you know do you agree with this prediction or you do do you not agree with this prediction and um and this is just a proof of concept so we haven't made the app yet but the idea is it it shouldn't just be for predictions it could be really for anything you can use this feed to train an ML model to actually better identify very niche and specific specific types of data um etc.

So this is one part of how we can get our community to generate alpha together. Uh we can give them a gamified experience where you do the actions on the feed, you gain experience points, you level up and you qualify for airdrops. Uh I mean even you know we can work with partners to also give additional rewards. Um, and as you build up your level or your XP, um, you will gain access you, well, you will have access actually to very valuable alpha. So, whatever you generate through this app, you will be able to get like a a free access to it via Sandbase or via any other other one of our apps uh, to that alpha.

That's the idea. We want to create something that we will charge institutional clients and bigger clients a lot of money for. But if you're a retail investor or um you know enthusiast of the crypto space and you're doing this for us, you get access to it in a way more inexpensive fashion. So we want to kind of break down that cost barrier for Alpha for retail investors. So check it out at our booth.

It's it's a pretty cool demo. Uh so to wrap things up uh we envision an alpha generating machine and really our vision is a gamified market intelligence ecosystem. So I shared a little bit about um you know sandbase sanitizer the community tab um and that's just a handful out of we have actually even more ideas on how we're going to make this ecosystem come together. This is still uh a vision that's being developed of course and uh what's really exciting is in about a year we're going to launch a token. It's going to be a relaunch of our token because I did mention we were one of the first ICOs actually.

Um and this relaunch of the token it's going to be intimately intertwined in all of these apps and we're going to be incentivizing people to actually create inputs in these apps and help us enrich our data even further. So in doing this we're innovating in the infoi space. We want uh not only to create new forms of alpha and new forms of data especially on the prediction side. Nobody's doing anything with prediction data. Uh but we also want to actually have a positive impact on the average person in the space.

You know the average person in the space is not a founder. It is not a a a hedge fund investor. It's it's not a whale. you know, it's crypto was meant for the people, the average person. And so that's a huge part of our value and our ethos and uh that's who we're building for.

And of course, um the puzzle pieces are coming together. So uh yeah, if it's relevant to you, reach out to us. Uh I'd be happy to talk to you if you're interested in our data uh via API. If you are an institutional person, I'm sorry. I don't have anything against you.

Uh, I actually appreciate you guys, but I care a lot about the the the regular person, you know. So, if it's relevant, reach out. Uh, our head of a API sales is here at the booth with us, Suzanne. Uh, and of course, I'm around, so feel free to talk to me about um literally anything to do with Infoi. It's interesting for me.

I could demo use Sandbase. Uh, I could hook you guys up with uh extended free trials. Uh, so yeah, come come by, say hello, and uh I'm really happy to talk to you guys. Uh, and yeah, there's a little infographic here. That's the stage where we're at now.

And our booth is right here in the in the DeFi district. So, yeah, happy to talk to you guys and thank you for attending my talk.

Thank you. Thank you so much, David, for your insight. So, now we have a couple of minutes for questions. So, please, if you have any, uh, please raise your hands and we'll give it to you. So, I see.

No, please don't f Yeah,

so uh the question was what's my favorite sentiment metric?

Yeah,

that's a really good question. I would say it's probably liquidations because I think liquidations have very strong predictive power on their own. So sentiment metrics, like the way that I use them is I often try to look at them as um confirmation for a trading decision I might make. So I look at a lot of them, but if I see a spike in liquidations, actually that's a really good time to buy. So uh historically speaking, anytime that there's a huge liquidation spike in crypto, if you bought at that moment, you made money.

So and I have successfully made money with that metric alone. So that's the probably the number one metric in my book, but of course I really like you know uh MVRV. I like uh there there's a number of them but yeah I I'll keep my answer short but yeah thank you for asking.

Thank you. And for the people that are watching live stream on X hello hello. So they are watching it and maybe they're here or they're at home and they are coming in a bit later. Can you repeat where is your booth? So if they have any questions?

Yeah, sure. Uh, our booth is in the DeFi district in the green pavilion. Uh, come by and say hi. There's a big sentiment sign right at the top. Uh, we have some swag for you.

We have, uh, some boot camps running. Uh, I think starting December 1st, we're going to do a 5-day mission-based onboarding for Sandbase. So, if you'd like to participate, please uh, join our Discord, say hello, and we'll shoot you a message. Um, a message to everybody, but you know, it's for you. Uh, yeah, come by.

And, uh, Chris, thank you. Thank you David. So please thank you so much everyone and let's wait for [music] our next speaker. Please claps for David. Everyone

yeah I appreciate you guys uh coming and listening the the five of the 10 of you and our team. Thank you

and live stream. Please don't forget our audience

live stream of course. Of course sorry you know um I have a bias for real life but I see you guys.

Yeah.

Thank you.

Thank you [music] guys.