Introducing the CrowdCent Challenge: The Future of Investment Management

At CrowdCent, we are driven by the conviction that a decentralized, collective intelligence holds the key to revolutionizing investment management. Today, we are excited to unveil our next step toward that future: the CrowdCent Challenge, an open data science competition that aims to blend crowdsourced human expertise with crowdsourced machine learning models in an effort to unlock superior investment insights and seamless capital allocation.

The Power of Collective Intelligence

Our journey began with a core belief: a well-designed machine-learning model can amplify the predictive signals that emerge from a diverse group of investors.

We've proven this approach through our hedge fund collaboration with the SumZero investment community. We convert every investment pitch into structured data, train our models on years of historical submissions, and evaluate each new idea that gets pitched, daily. This data-driven pipeline, fueled by thousands of individuals, and augmented by machine learning, currently guides tens of millions of dollars.

But this is only the start. Why are we the only ones building models on our data? Now, we're inviting everyone to leverage our datasets, build predictive models, and contribute to a collective intelligence that reshapes investment management.

Announcing: The Hyperliquid Ranking Competition

The CrowdCent Challenge kicks off with the Hyperliquid Ranking challenge. This inaugural event will focus on ranking crypto assets listed on the Hyperliquid perpetuals decentralized exchange (DEX). Why Hyperliquid? Hyperliquid is a decentralized protocol that allows for both long and short positions on a wide range of token derivatives, offering a realistic universe for participants to build and test models that predict real market outcomes.

Here's the structure:

  • Prepared or Bring Your Own Datasets: Participants will access unique datasets we derive from our partner communities & data vendors. Features will be obfuscated, but may encompass various data modalities, from momentum to news embeddings. For many challenges, participants can bring their own datasets to predict the investment universe as well.
  • Model Development: Data scientists and quantitative analysts will leverage these datasets to construct and train their predictive models, all while ensuring complete data integrity and privacy.
  • Continuous Competition: The Challenge features modular, on-going competitions. Models will be evaluated regularly on their ability to predict real-world market movements across various assets.
  • The Metamodel: The network of models from each inference period will be integrated into a unified "metamodel". This composite model can be turned into an infinite number of trading strategies and portfolios that will guide actual capital allocation.

Why Crypto First?

Our decision to launch with a crypto ranking competition is strategic:

  1. Nascent Markets, Greater Alpha: Crypto markets are still ~~incredibly stupid~~ evolving and exhibit inefficiencies. Predictive models that achieve modest success in traditional equity markets can often find significantly stronger signals and higher correlations in the crypto space.
  2. Demonstrated Expertise & Openness: Our team has a strong track record in crypto asset ranking. We are a team of hedge fund professionals who have been in the trenches and have a deep understanding of the crypto markets. We are committed to transparency and will openly share our methodologies and models with the community. We'll be open sourcing our models and methodologies through new open source projects like centimators, a new open-source Python library, to help participants build complex, multi-step pipelines and ml models with ease.
  3. Accessible Data: Unlike the data landscape for traditional finance, which is firmly controlled by a few large entities, crypto data is largely open. This accessibility fosters broader participation and democratizes innovation. Crypto's composability allows for the CrowdCent Metamodel to be easily turned into a wide range of trading strategies and portfolios.

The Vision: Equity NLP and Beyond

The Hyperliquid Ranking competition is just the first step. Our long term vision for the CrowdCent Challenge includes expanding into other asset classes and pioneering new forms of data. We are particularly excited about the potential for an Equity NLP Challenge. Imagine a competition where participants build models to analyze and extract predictive signals directly from the qualitative investment theses and research reports generated by investment communities.

Why This Matters: A New Investment Paradigm

The CrowdCent Challenge is the progression of a movement to redefine how investment intelligence is generated, valued, and rewarded:

  • Decentralizing Investment Management: We believe investment intelligence should not be confined to traditional institutions. Our platform empowers talented individuals worldwide, democratizing access to capital allocation opportunities based purely on merit and predictive performance.

  • Human + Machine Intelligence: Our core vision is to seamlessly blend human-generated insights with machine learning models. Future challenges, such as our planned Equity NLP Challenge, will leverage natural language processing to extract predictive signals directly from qualitative investment theses and research reports, embodying our belief in the power of combined human and artificial intelligence.

  • Collaboration Over Competition: At CrowdCent, we see no competitors—only potential collaborators. Participants are encouraged to share methodologies, insights, and innovations, fostering a vibrant community that collectively advances the frontier of investment management.

Join us

Launching the CrowdCent Challenge is an ambitious undertaking, and we're under no illusions about the challenges. Issues like data quality, fair value attribution, and regulatory compliance must be addressed thoughtfully.

Despite the challenges ahead, our optimism is unwavering. We believe this collaborative, data-driven approach is the future of investment management and capital allocation. It's a future where insightful individuals from across the globe can contribute to, and benefit from, a powerful collective intelligence network.

This is just the beginning, and we invite you to be a part of it. Whether you are a seasoned machine learning engineer, a sharp financial analyst, or simply passionate about the intersection of markets and technology, the CrowdCent Challenge offers a unique platform for you to make your mark.

Stay tuned for more details. The future of investing is collaborative, intelligent, open, and it's happening now.

Disclaimer: this material does not constitute an offer to sell, or a solicitation of an offer to buy, any security or investment product, and may not be relied upon in connection with the purchase or sale of any security. Any such offering will be made only pursuant to confidential offering documents and in reliance on applicable exemptions from registration.

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