ICO Review of: Enigma Catalyst ($ENG) Decentralized quant-trading platform

The cryptocurrency market nowadays gets more exposure to business news, press articles, and TV coverage than any time before in the history of cryptocurrencies. Many new people try to enter this market due to the news. It creates strong demand for high quality infrastructure around the cryptocurrency market, because investors always want comfort, reliability and safety. Also, investors (especially the newcomers) want to pay someone else to manage their portfolios. And that’s what we are going to talk about.

Today I want to review the project, which has a chance to become the best provider of the tools to do quantitative trading on cryptocurrency markets. Enigma Catalyst doesn’t want to stop here because on their platform you will also be able to create your own hedge fund or invest into a successful quantitative trader. Even though, Enigma has competitors (like Melonport or ICONOMI) which also have the tools for the creation of decentralized investment funds, Catalyst will be able to offer more. And I will cover it quite extensively.

BTW, this project is backed by well-known VCs. Take, for example, Digital Currency Group. It looks like Enigma is expected to be a successful project from their point of view. I hope it is so.

I will try to cover the most interesting features of this project in this review and I hope you will like my presentation.

What can I tell you about the team? All that I can say is that it is the strongest team in terms of background I have ever seen on the ICO scene (Basic Attention Token and Enigma now divide the first place in that matter). Most of them are MIT graduates, some are ex-employees of McKinsey, and they have strong background in quantitative trading.

Advisory board is also worth mentioning. Professor Alex Pentland is a board member at Google and Telefonica. Justin Lent is a former director of hedge fund development at Quantopian. Quantopian is a leading platform which provides traders will all the necessary tools to build trading strategies.

There are a lot of interesting personalities so be sure to check them all out on the Enigma website.

Enigma Catalyst will create two decentralized platforms to realize high quality quantitative trading of cryptocurrencies.

What is the problem Enigma Catalyst wants to solve? First of all, they want to fill the void of the trading tools for cryptocurrency market. Second of all, they see great potential in cryptocurrency market and growing amount of people that want to invest into high-quality cryptocurrency traders. To make it possible, they will create two decentralized platforms. One is called Catalyst, the other is called Enigma.

Project is tapping into the market of hedge funds and the market of cryptocurrencies by creating tools for sophisticated trading. As you know, a lot of hedge funds now go through the process of registering their CryptoCurrency funds due to the high demand from investors. But why should we do it the old way when we have the tools to pay only the best traders for them to manage our cryptocurrencies? The traders on decentralized platforms will have substantially lower performance and management fees than standard hedge funds. But here is the disadvantage. We still have to wait until such projects as Melonport and Enigma Catalyst finalize their products before putting our hard earned cryptos into untested environments.

The main stakeholders of Enigma project are: quantitative traders, cryptocurrency investors, and data curators. Data curators will provide premium data sources for traders. Quantitative traders will create their own hedge funds on Enigma Catalyst, and investors will put their funds in the most profitable and successful hedge funds on the platform.

Currently, the project has 2 platforms in development: Catalyst (trading platform) and Enigma (data marketplace). The developers are putting a lot of emphasis on the decentralized data marketplace, because the availability of certain data can have serious financial impact on the trading.

ENG tokens are native currency of ecosystem. They will be used in different ways.

1. First of all, the tokens will be used to reward the most successful traders on Enigma Catalyst.
2. Secondly, ENG tokens will be used to pay for the premium data sources which will provide high-quality data to assist trading.
3. In order to invest into someone’s hedge fund on the platform, investors will have to spend some ENG tokens. The exact numbers are still unknown.
4. Another important usage of ENG tokens is the rewards for liquidity providers (ENIGMA will have its own decentralized exchange)

Catalyst will use decentralized exchange protocol and off chain solution to enable fast transactions and maintain full customer ownership of funds.

To secure the privacy of trading technique, only performance and strategy are revealed on Catalyst. Best traders get higher ranking and more capital from investors

Enigma Catalyst wants to tap into the fast growing cryptocurrency market.

Cryptocurrency market is very volatile, but many experts predict it to reach $1 trillion capitalization until 2020.
Main competitors of Enigma Catalyst are: Melonport and ICONOMI. Melonport is more concentrated on providing portfolio management tools while Enigma aims at conquering quantitative trading.

Currently, there is no close competitor of Enigma Catalyst, they are developing unique quant-trading platform and digital marketplace for data.

Enigma decentralized data marketplace will resemble Reuters/Bloomberg but on cryptocurrency market. We all know how important it is to be the first to know about certain event, because this event can significantly impact our assets’ valuation. So that’s exactly where Enigma wants to be the best.

The project plans to concentrate on investors, who are interested in putting their money in algo- trading funds, which are managed by successful quantitative traders.

The profit generation comes from the appreciation of the ENG tokens due to the demand on the secondary market.
ENG investors/tokenholders need to hold tokens until both platforms (enigma & catalyst) go live to reap all the benefits.
Enigma Catalyst has strong support from big VCs, they have very perspective project/idea, and one of the strongest teams. ENG is expected to be in demand.

Actual usage and success of the platform will create strong demand of ENG tokens. It will ensure the lucrative growth of ENG capitalization.

ENG is pure usability token, so there is not going to be any dividends or profit sharing mechanism. BTW, this project is curated by famous blockchain lawyer Marco Santori and ENG tokens are certainly not unregistered securities. So, Enigma Catalyst allows US investors.

What about the community of Enigma Catalyst? They have grown sharply for the last two weeks and now have quite a big fan base.

• They have 2634 members on Slack
• About 3000 subscribers on twitter
• 1300 readers on Medium blog
• 1200 members in the telegram chat

Enigma Catalyst already has alpha version of trading platform anybody can test.

Enigma Catalyst’s main goal is to serve as a one-stop shop for quantitative traders, who are interested in applying trading strategies on crypto-markets. To make it possible, the Enigma team has created their own engine which will accommodate the quantitative traders .

What are the main features of the trading engine the Enigma Catalyst will provide?

First is pipeline API, it encompasses all the developer needs to make trading decisions. It is made to be a scalable way to dynamically select securities to trade.

Orders API, it is responsible for executing trades.

Events API makes it possible to trigger trades when certain event happens.

With Data sources, the traders will be able to access premium data streams which are concentrated specifically around cryptocurrencies.

Market adaptation feature will embed the considerations that are unique to the cryptoworld, such as: no market closing time, multiple exchanges.

With deployment API the traders will be able to connect strategies to trading engines.

Crowdsale favors early pre-sale investors and will provide them with a bonus. Half of tokens will be distributed to investors.

ICO starts on 11th of September, 2017.

Project will distribute half of its tokens to investors ( 50%), 25% of tokens will be used for incentives, and the remaining 25% will be in the hands of the team. ENG is ERC-20 token.

Pre-sale investors will be rewarded with bonuses. ICO is hard-capped at $30mln.

ENG ecosystem doesn’t have inflation like Melonport. If you didn’t know, the module developers in Melonport ecosystem receive inflationary MLNs.

Minimum investment into crowdsale is $60 (100 ENG tokens).

60% proceeds will be used in development, 15% research, 10% Marketing, 10% operations, 5% Legal.

What about disadvantages and advantages?

Advantages
• First, team is a strong asset of this project.
• Second, there is an alpha version of Catalyst platform you can try out.
• Third, Enigma is backed by famous VCs.
• Fourth, Crypto market really needs the Enigma’s products

Disadvantages
• There are strong competitors like Melonport or ICONOMI
• The crowdsale terms are not that lucrative. Only 50% of tokens will be distributed