On June 6th, BAG became available on OceanEx, giving buyers their first chance to invest in the project. This sparked a frenzy, with the price shooting up nearly 1000%.

BAG had large gains on their first day of listing

The issue? Nobody outside of China had any idea what the project actually was.

So what is it?

Bitagora aims to be an AI-powered predictive markets and community ecosystem, using a series of features to provide value to the users. Here’s a quick look at some of the features, in a more easy to understand format:

Decentralized Knowledge Base

As a news aggregator and content portal, the platform will provide users with the latest in accurate and trustworthy content, allowing users to make more informed decisions. Included are breaking news stories, market data, and third-party analysis. This is especially valuable in China, where larger news sources typically avoid reporting on digital currencies. Smaller news sources are unreliable and often distort facts to promote personal agendas, a problem often mirrored by the western media. Content creators can contribute and be rewarded with the BAG token, encouraging them to report with more integrity to attract a larger following. Content creators will be able to interact with followers in a number of ways, including interactive polls and live-streaming. This will help Bitagora become one of the most trustable sources of blockchain news and data, as they build a decentralized knowledge base.

Shared and Incentivized Community Buidling

Another feature is the blockchain-based community building platform – users will be able to create private communities where they can provide forecasting insight such as technical and fundamental analysis. By using the BAG token, users can charge for access to communities and predictions, while the blockchain aspect of the communities allows users to verify past predictions to ensure the accuracy of the forecasting. This ensures a level of credibility to users who provide quality predictions, and encourages new users to pay for services with confidence.

Predictions, AI, and Quantitative Analysis

The predictive nature of the platform doesn’t stop here though – confident users can stake tokens on their predictions in smart contracts – creating a decentralized reward pool that forecasters compete for. AI algorithms analyze the collective predictions to form quantitative analysis based on overall platform market sentiment. Users who stake predictions value in two ways – they can earn tokens for being right, while also adding to their blockchain-verified prediction history, which can be used to attract users to their private communities. As a whole, the community benefits by having more verifiable forecasting data available, and can easily see which users have been successful in the past, as well as gauge overall trends that are free from individual biases.

The overall platform is discussed in much more depth in the whitepaper.

Who is behind this?

The Bitagora project evolved from BCTOPIA, which was one of the largest social communities and news sources for digital currencies, with a focus on market predictions and analysis. They will have the benefit of an existing community and team to launch their platform on. The CEO and founder is listed in the whitepaper as Cai Songting, whose credentials are listed below:

As an Australian, Songting had initially served as a system engineer at British Aerospace Systems Australia. A set of unique trading systems and models were formed for the quantitative and macro transaction system algorithms and concepts, and the high frequency / quantitative trading model of stock index futures and commodity futures was established by him. Subsequently he became the director of investment in Shenzhen Qianhai Tianmou investment fund. In September 2017, his first public private placement fund was issued, and its main strategy was based on commodity futures high frequency trading strategy. The trading profit was higher than 50% a year, and the maximum drawback was very small.

Songting holds a Bachelor of communication and network engineering from Swinburne University of Technology in Australia; a Master of information systems from Australian National University; a Master of Business Administration from MIT – Tsinghua University. – From the Bitagora Whitepaper

So what can we expect?

Bitagora emerged quietly and suddenly on the Chinese market, and the token was listed with little fanfare. The previous platform, BCTOPIA, is well-known in China among digital currency traders, so should be able to gain traction and users when the platform is launched later this year. The Chinese market is in dire need of more legitimate data sources, especially as the investing scene matures and more and more projects take root.

For VeChain investors, the blockchain-based predictive model could be a great way to encourage transactional volume on the mainnet as platform interactions and smart contracts burn VTHO on a daily basis.

Still, there remains a lot of questions about the platform. Data is scarce on the website, and the first English-language whitepaper has many mistakes throughout. While this platform might initially be focused on the Chinese community, it would be nice to see more transparency and details before listing on exchanges like OceanEx. My initial attempts to contact the project weren’t very successful, and the information in this article is based on the whitepaper, basic research, and third-party sources. In the upcoming weeks, I’ll continue attempting to learn more about the mysterious project – where we can hopefully learn more about the scope and legitimacy of the team, investors, and strategic partners.