Thailand-based project Carboneum wants one thing above all: to make investing in crypto easy for the masses.

“We want to make a platform that will allow people to invest in cryptocurrency,” says project founder and CEO Max Kortrakul. “The best approach is to develop a social trading platform, which allows people to learn from each other.”

Developed by the same team that brought you StockRadars, the popular mobile analytics and trading app boasting about 800,000 downloads, the Carboneum protocol seeks to democratize investing by providing the man on the street with the insight and real-time information now monopolized by a very small group of people. It also helps those new to the crypto space learn the ropes faster by linking them with expert traders, or “leaders,” who earn rewards for making profitable trades.

“The business model is very simple,” says Kortrakul. Social trading generates revenue only when one condition is met – the leader makes a successful trade, earning profits for themselves and their followers and platform fees for Carboneum, a “win-win-win” situation.

Crypto trading as a social activity

Current social trading platforms allow investors to replicate the transactions of expert traders. However, the centralized structures of these trading platforms don’t allow users to verify which trade orders have been replicated, and are also vulnerable to single points of failure.

Carboneum, on the other hand, hopes to leverage the transparency of blockchain technology to develop a decentralized social trading platform, one that lets users see exactly what’s being done with their money.

“The concept of social trading is follow the leader,” says Kortrakul. “But the best thing and the beauty of the blockchain is that all the transactions are transparent. So you can get all the data publicly and see who performed best over the past month without any approval from the wallet. All those transactions are transparent already. So we just make use of that information, make it useful.”

Best of all, an application built using Carboneum would give the uninitiated a teacher – or teachers – who can hold their hands, digitally speaking, as they explore the brave new world of cryptocurrency investment. It’s a shortcut to learning the art of the trade. Kortrakul likens it to learning golf. “If beginners want to start trading, it’s very hard to learn by themselves,” he says. “It’s just like when you play golf. If you try to learn it from a book or from watching Youtube, it’s not like playing with a pro.” On Carboneum, you learn rather than study.

To give users a vehicle to use Carboneum, the team is upgrading its CarbonRadars mobile cryptocurrency analytics app, turning into a DApp with social trading functionality. The upgraded DApp should be released in the first quarter of next year. Kortrakul stresses, though, that Carboneum itself is an open protocol that other developers can use to power social trading DApps of their own creation.