Numerai is an American prediction market company and hedge fund that recently raised $11 million in an ICO so it can launch the Erasure project. The information comes from the company itself.
What Numerai does is “… incentivizing the construction of an artificial intelligence hedge fund with Numeraire, a cryptographic token on the Ethereum blockchain.” The network that Numerai uses, the Numeraire network was introduced in 2016, providing cryptographic and blockchain ecosystem based on tokens for motivating anonymous data scientists to create different predictive models. The entire network is built on the ETH blockchain. The startup’s platform uses Numeraire tokens in the trading market predictions.
According to press, the funds from the ICO will go towards the company’s Erasure project. Erasure is the decentralized unit of the company’s marketplace. Erazure is expected to launch in the end of 2019. The unit will give the opportunity to all scientists and users to actually sell their predictive models to any investment fund of their choice through the public network with the help of the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS), a peer-to-peer network. In addition, users will be able to connect their crypto wallets directly to the marketplace. Apart from the interesting market model of Erasure, the unit will also enable any predictive models to be done on any asset. Currently, Numerai offers predictions only on more traditional assets. Erasure will help the hedge fund diversify its product base significantly.
The ICO was supported by some prominent investors, including private equity company Placeholder and Paradigm, a crypto investment firm started by Fred Ehrsam, one of the co-founders of Coinbase.