As the first quarter of 2019 draws to a close, we would like to take this opportunity to share with the community of SHP holders what we’ve been working on and lay out our plans over the coming months and beyond.

With BTC hovering at around the $4000 mark, precisely where it was three months ago, one could be forgiven for surmising all is quiet on the blockchain front. BTC trading volume, however, recently reached its highest level in 12 months, with various anecdotal reports that OTC-traded BTC is similarly growing.

Interest in novel blockchain platforms and products appears to be resurgent, with interesting picking up in initial offerings through exchange platforms (so-called “IEO’s”) have recently become popular means of fundraising — for example with Fetch selling out in seconds on the Binance launchpad , briefly trading afterwards at a 500% premium — however, these offerings are not without their skeptics.

From our perspective at least, a return to the token mania of 2017 would not be a progressive development for the industry, and we hope to to see startups raising reasonable capital through these means, and not the tens-to-hundreds of millions we’ve seen in recent history.

We’ve recently seen some positive changes in regulatory landscapes. Notably, Thailand is moving quickly to establish itself as a well-regulated environment for cryptocurrency and Digital Securities enterprises. At the recent Digital Securities Summit in Bangkok last week, positive sentiment certainly abounded from the panels. Sharpe is also particularly excited to follow the progress of IOB as they pursue the world’s first initial public offering of a token, through the German regulator BAFin. Finally, we’re keeping a close eye on the progress of Vega, who are building truly a decentralised derivatives exchange platform for both equities and crypto.

Sharpe Centuri Update

The most significant change we are rolling out in the next week is a reduction to the number of sentiment indications that users are permitted to provide in a one month period. We want users to have the best possible chance to maximise their reputation score and to earn service fees for providing accurate, useful sentiment.

It is now widely accepted that the majority of cryptocurrency assets are highly correlated with BTC and ETH, rendering individual sentiments to be somewhat of secondary importance. Analysis of user accuracy over the millions of predictions we have collected makes it clear that it is possible to have an edge on individual equities, but in crypto this edge entirely disappears.

We have taken the decision to mitigate these issues by removing crypto assets from Centuri, and to randomly display a sample of 150 equities from the S&P500 to collect sentiment from each user every month. In the longer term, we are working to optimise this process such that assets seen are related to those that each user has historically had greater accuracy in. We hope these changes will assist Centuri users in providing more thoughtful sentiment with less of the associated time pressures. This feature is scheduled to roll out to production at the end of this week.

Sharpe Global Sentiment Index

The ‘Global Sentiment Index’ is the internal project name for our market analytics product derived from Centuri user data, which combines crowdsourced sentiment with Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing technologies.