San Francisco-based new hedge fund Numerai announced that it pays its data scientists with bitcoins. It transforms and regularizes financial data into machine learning problems for its global network of data scientists, as reported by Wired.com.



According to the fund’s founders, few data scientists receive payments in bitcoins for building algorithmic models and bolstering future predictions. The report said that each week, 100 scientists earn bitcoins, with the company paying out over $150,000 in the digital currency so far. According to Richard Craib, who runs the hedge fund, if the fund reaches a billion dollars under management, it would pay out over $1 million each month to its data scientists.



The data scientists are recruited online and are paid in bitcoins as that can preserve the anonymity. “Anyone can submit predictions back to us,” he stated. “If they work, we pay them in bitcoin.”



The company claims itself to be a tiny startup that seeks to reinvent the financial industry through artificial intelligence, encryption, crowdsourcing, and bitcoin. Numerai gathers intelligence from over 7,000 data scientists harnessing stock market prediction accuracy and has worked with over 29 billion equity predictions, the Bitcoin.com reported.



“Every data scientist on Numerai is solving the same problem using the same underlying features. But every data scientist approaches the problem in their own unique way. No data scientist on Numerai has a machine learning model that is better than all the other models combined,” Numerai blog post stated.