Cryptocurrency’s deeply-entrenched open source nature has long birthed innovative startups. Riding on this open-source wave, Superalgos, a 100% bootstrapped community-owned project with the motto- ‘Crowdsourcing Superpowers for Retail Traders’, was started in late 2021. The firm, which boasts about its commitment-driven user-centric paradigm, has now become the top free and open-source trading platform on GitHub.
CoinCodeCap had a quick chat with one of its founders, Julian Molina, where he talked about the present state of the cryptocurrency space, Superalgos’ vision, ambition, and expansion goals moving forward.
Excerpts from the Interview:
1) What was the main goal behind starting Superalgos?
It all started with a group of friends looking to automate a few strategies to accumulate Bitcoin. That was our goal! After a few months of coding what would become the foundation of the Superalgos Platform, we realized how complex the game was. We figured that going open-source was the best way to foster collective intelligence to compete with the big boys in trading firms.
2) In an increasingly saturated Web3 atmosphere, how do you think your firm stands out from the rest?
The Superalgos Project is disruptive at the level of the business model. The platform is free, open-source, and privacy-focused. It provides maximum power and flexibility to build sophisticated trading systems and is optimized for collaboration. Trading bot companies with business models predicated on extracting value from users can’t compete with a user-centric paradigm.
3) There’s also widespread speculation that AI-driven trading bots could ultimately replace specialized tools… what are your thoughts on that?
AI is particularly well suited for distilling trading intelligence from data.
A trading automation platform like Superalgos provides the infrastructure to put that intelligence to good use, solving multiple plumbing issues like the communication with exchanges, the extraction and processing of data from all sorts of sources and APIs, the design and testing of sophisticated trading systems, the deployment of coordinated trading tasks across multiple pieces of hardware, the collaboration of teams of people with different roles in decentralized trading organizations, and more.
In other words, Superalgos provides the infrastructure that both humans and AI agents need to do their trading.
4) How do you think the European Parliament’s MiCA regulation will impact your business?
Superalgos has no commercial operations. We are an open-source project. People download and run the platform in their premises, trading directly within their accounts at their exchange of choice, with no intermediaries. As a project, we don’t touch user funds, strategies, or anything our users create with the platform.
The project distributes the native token among open-source contributors as an incentive to accelerate development. The project does not sell tokens, not privately or publicly. It is people who earn tokens by contributing to the project who may decide to list the token in DEXs.
With this framework, the project is out of bounds of token-issuing and money-handling regulations or securities laws.
5) What are your expansion goals for Superalgos moving forward?
We conceived Superalgos as a two-stage project. The first stage was about building the most robust, powerful, and flexible trading automation platform, targeting a niche market of technical users. We launched the Superalgos Platform in December 2021 after 12 open beta versions.
The expansion comes with stage two, which is about leveraging the platform and the technical user base to deploy an open Social Trading Network targeting the mass market.
The technical wizards using the Superalgos Platform to build their own trading systems are incentivized with the native token to broadcast trading signals over a peer-to-peer network without revealing the underlying strategies. Then, the general public may listen to those signals and act upon them in an automated fashion doing simple copy-trading or incorporating them into their own trading systems as third-party intelligence.
Currently, the signal-distribution network is in an open beta stage, and the community is building a Social Trading App to cater to non-technical users.
6) With the collapse of big names like FTX, 3AC investors are becoming wary of investing in crypto startups. Is their fear unfounded?
It’s not unfounded, but it may be misguided. Investors need to grapple with the fact that when incentives don’t align, projects are doomed to fail. The model by which founders sell tokens at a premium in a private round to fund development, and later sell tokens to the public at a higher price is inherently flawed, as it creates perverse incentives for early investors and for founders alike.
Early investors are incentivized to rotate capital quickly, and end up dumping tokens on retail investors as soon as they are allowed to. Founders are incentivized to focus on marketing a public sale instead of achieving product-market fit.
It’s a terrible system.
That’s why Superalgos functions on a completly different paradigm. The project is 100% bootstrapped. We achieved product-market-fit without any funding at all, simply through open-source collaboration.
Contributors earn tokens for the value they add to the project. The token grants governance powers and access to special perks like the trading intelligence distributed over the Social Trading Network, which is available exclusively to token holders.
People who can’t contribute work, may buy tokens from those who can to access trading signals. If they don’t like the service, they can sell the tokens back in the market. Under this framework, no one gets rug-pulled and projects have significantly higher odds of success.
