The concept behind Sharpe Capital is to use the wisdom of the crowd to predict growth in markets. Getty Images

Trading equities would be simplified if stock prices moved up and down merely based on peoples' belief of an asset's price or its future price. However, realists recognize that there's a bigger element at play, and that is investor sentiment -- movement of market prices based on their perception of what the crowd believes about an asset's future performance. This is much tougher to peg down.

One company hopes to solve the problem through machine learning technology and quantitative modeling, and claims to be able to perceive potentialities as humans do and determine a level of confidence in a prediction and position. It is called the Sharpe Platform and was developed by Sharpe Capital. The concept includes rewarding users for providing useful sentiment by delivering service fees in the ETH cyprocurrency and combining the information from users with Sharpe Capital's proprietary algorithm in an attempt to better inform investment decisions.

Users have nothing to lose. If their predictions are wrong, then no tokens will be forfeited. While that may seem appealing for many users, others may be concerned about the veracity of predictions with only reputation at risk. The gamification is enticing and the reputation score should work with time, but time appears to be an essential ingredient in order to help perfect the process.

Over time, the founders' hope is that the Sharpe Capital algorithm learns the specific types of assets that its users are better at providing sentiment on, with the platform focusing more heavily on them. Users that are more successful at the predictions will be delivered the aforesaid service fee payments based on the amount of sentiment provided, the accuracy of their assessments and the proof-of-stake (the number of Shape Platform Tokens -- SHP -- held). The higher a person's reputation score on the platform, the more ETH that person receives when correct on a prediction.

A person must hold SHP in order to propose motions that the whole Sharpe Capital community then votes on, using smart contracts to guarantee equitable votes. That same new currency may be used to access proprietary sentiment data on the platform.