Updates on 2017-09-05 : In response to the hacking incident on August 20, 2017 and the last minute change in crowdsale terms (50% increase in the total token supply) announced by the team on September 5, 2017, we have updated our recommendation on the Enigma Catalyst ICO. We originally had a positive/positive recommendation for short- and long-term holding and we have downgraded it to negative/neutral. Please see our updated Conclusion section.

Summary

Project Overview

What does ﻿the ﻿﻿company/project do?

Enigma Catalyst is an investment platform that enables developers to build, test, and execute micro crypto-funds. Through Catalyst, developers can access Enigma’s decentralized data marketplace protocol and consume valuable crypto-data that can be used in their strategies.

Catalyst allows developers, quants, and experienced traders to easily build, simulate, back-test, and eventually live trade cryptocurrencies using sophisticated programmatic strategies. Regular investors can then invest directly in winning strategies through Catalyst’s system.

However, in order to perform algorithmic trading on crypto-assets, reliable and up-to-date data is needed. Catalyst plans to curate the initial data sets, but in the future, it is expected that most data will be generated by the community in return for incentives (i.e. ECAP subscription fees).

By creating a decentralized data marketplace, investors can subscribe and consume the data while paying a fee to the contributors who provide such data.

To provide a sense of the market size, top hedge funds like Citadel, Two Sigma and Renaissance spend tens of millions of dollars every year on high-quality data. Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters, the two major players in the financial data industry, generated a total of over $20 billion in revenues last year.

How advanced ﻿is ﻿the project?

The idea of Enigma was first conceived in 2015, when it was a research project at MIT.

In July 2017, Catalyst Alpha was released. You can check it out here﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿.

The minimal viable product (MVP) is scheduled to launch in 2018 Q1. Functionalities include testing API, live trading, extended data sets, and web UI / IDE.

In 2018 Q2-Q3, further functionalities will be added to Catalyst, including investment platform, single exchange sign-on, community driven governance (data sets), and trading ICOs.

Catalyst is scheduled to convert the system to a decentralized one in 2019 Q1, along with eliminating the custodian.

What are the tokens used for and how can token holders make money?

ECAP tokens are used to reward creation by and for the community (e.g. trading strategies, data sources) and are consumed when community members access premium services on the platform. Right now there are two main token dynamics: