We would like to thank The Economist and all thirteen teams that participated in the Kraken investment challenge to optimize a $1 million, 5-year bitcoin-ether portfolio.

We enjoyed reviewing the variety of approaches taken across proposals. The videos and papers have already generated organic conversation among viewers that will help encourage beginners to learn more about the value of digital assets.

We’d like to stress that we did not assess proposals based on whether they represented bitcoin-dominant or ether-dominant portfolios. We are an agnostic exchange which means that we do not prefer a certain digital asset over another. We evaluated proposals, including both the paper and the video from each team, based on other key qualities (e.g., apparent depth of understanding of the subject matter, accuracy in their representations, ability to clearly convey their findings and conclusions in an engaging way, etc.)

With that said, we chose these three winning teams that just so happen to have bitcoin-dominant portfolios:

1st Place – Tulane University, Freeman School of Business (67% bitcoin / 33% ether)

Video summary:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWSYFZ2Fbno

Full solution:

http://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/tulane_university_report_kraken_investment_case_comp.pdf

2nd place – Ryerson University, Ted Rogers School of Management (69% bitcoin / 31% ether)

Video summary:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=alhyMgAm1o8

Full solution:

http://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/the_future_of_cryptocurrency.pdf

3rd place – BYU Marriott School of Management (78% bitcoin / 22% ether)

Video summary:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2dESOtEY_2M

Full solution: http://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/the_digital_asset_of_the_future__team_byu.pdf

We were surprised that our objective assessment didn’t yield winners with ether-dominant portfolios, however, the explanation as to why the three winners all happen to have bitcoin-dominant portfolios is actually quite simple. First of all, only 3/13 proposals were ether-dominant. Secondly, the three teams that scored the highest did such a solid job overall in terms of their research approach, as well as their video presentations that it was clear they deserved to win, whether they represented a diverse set of portfolio distributions collectively as a group or not.

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