Summary

Symbol: ECAT

Crowdsale opening date: 21 August 2017

Platform for Fundraiser: Ethereum

Introduction

It is a platform that empowers anyone to build their own crypto hedge fund. Their vision is to enable developers to build winning investment strategies, a strong track record and attract investment from community investors. Catalyst is a playground where developers, quants, and experienced traders can easily build, simulate and eventually live trade cryptocurrencies using sophisticated programmatic strategies. Regular investors can then invest directly in winning strategies through our system. With this, they hoping to make smart-investing in this new emerging asset class accessible to everyone. 

Analysis

Problem

Currently, centralized exchanges have a history of halting payments and worse losing assets under their custody. Decentralized on-chain exchange protocols lack the low-latency characteristics to support any practical trading infrastructure or high-frequency trading. 

Solution

As a playground, it will help developers, quants and experienced traders can easily build, simulate and eventually, live trade cryptocurrencies. Regular investors can then invest directly in winning strategies through our system. Catalyst is also a protocol to bridge existing and future exchanges into a single, decentralized system that is fast, scalable and most importantly keeps users in control of their funds. 

Value Proposition for Investors

The ECAT token which is Catalyst’s native token serves a critical and transparent purpose for all stakeholders. 

Catalyst tokens will be used to reward and also a mode of payment for trading strategies, data sources also will become the fees by community members to access premium services on the platform. 

Right now, they are focusing on four main token dynamics: 

• Quant-trading platform 
  • High performing trading strategies will be rewarded with Catalyst tokens through periodical competitions. Developers will be required to spend Catalyst tokens to be eligible to attract investments. 
• Data marketplace 
  • Consuming Catalyst tokens will provide access to premium data sources. Similarly, data curators will charge community members via Catalyst tokens. 
• Investment platform 
  • Users who invest in trading strategies will have to consume Catalyst tokens. The management and performance fees that traders charge will also be based on Catalyst tokens. 
• Catalyst Exchange 
  • Liquidity providers running their exchange protocol will be given Catalyst tokens proportional to their contribution to the liquidity pool.

My View

The team behind Enigma Catalyst is not just a team looking at helping to build a decentralized hedge fund solution but have the core Enigma paper to build a decentralized computation framework which may be eclipsed with emerging frameworks like Plasma or Qtum but still holds some interesting aspects. Also, they have a unique paper on decentralized privacy which if executed can provide to be a game changer in implementing decentralized apps on mobile and (Internet of Things) IoT devices as well. 

Platform

Enigma

It is a decentralized computation platform with guaranteed privacy. At its core, it is a P2P network, enabling different parties to jointly store and run computations on data while keeping the data completely private. Enigma‘s computational model is based on a highly optimized version of secure multi-party computation (MPC) framework, guaranteed by a veritable secret-sharing scheme. For storage, they use a modified distributed hash table for holding secret-shared data. An external blockchain is utilized as the controller of the network, manages access control, identities and serves as a tamper-proof log of events. Security deposits and fees incentivize operation, correctness and fairness of the system. Enigma removes the need for a trusted third party, enabling autonomous control of personal data. 

Enigma is designed to connect to an existing blockchain and off-load private and intensive computations to an off-chain network. All transactions are facilitated by the blockchain, which enforces access-control based on digital signatures and programmable permissions. The code is executed both on the blockchain (public parts) and on Enigma (private or computationally intensive parts). Enigma’s execution ensures both privacy and correctness, whereas a blockchain alone can only ensure the latter. Proofs of correct execution are stored on the blockchain and can be audited. They will have a Turing-complete scripting language for designing end-to-end decentralized applications using private contracts, a more powerful variation of smart contracts that can handle private information. Code execution in blockchain is decentralized but not distributed, so every node redundantly executes the same code and maintains the same public-state. In Enigma, the computational work is efficiently distributed across the network. An interpreter breaks down the execution of a private contract, resulting in improved run-time while maintaining both privacy and verifiable. Their distributed computation design is inspired from secure MPC based on SPDZ that depend on a public append-only bulletin board, which stores the trail of each computation. 

Catalyst

Catalyst is a set of applications and the infrastructure to drive better investment strategies, hence increasing the adoption of crypto-assets. 

Catalyst is expanding on the existing work of Quantopian to enable developers to create successful crypto-asset trading strategies. 

To begin trading, users open payment channels with a chosen liquidity provider, in the currencies they wish to trade. The assets are exchanged atomically by executing a single, cross-chain payment, routed through the liquidity provider. Catalyst attempts to make algorithmic trading accessible for developers, by providing a complete toolchain that makes developing and testing trading strategies easy.

Key Features

• Provides Code Privacy 
• Zipline is the engine used. 
• Trading SDK 
  • Any developer will be able to use our free open-source Python SDK, either locally or over a web-based IDE and quickly design trading strategies and back-test them. 
• The core of the exchange architecture provides a method of performing cross-chain atomic swaps using hashed time- lock contracts (HTLCs), operating under the direction of an algorithmic trade manager. 
• Cross-Chain Atomic Swaps and Channel Rebalancing 
  • The liquidity of the exchange is ultimately limited by how successfully individual channels can be made to hold the required directional liquidity, at the time a particular trade needs to be executed. 
• Counterparty Anonymity 
  • The protocol offers traders honest counterparty anonymity, which prevents anyone other than an honest exchange from learning the counterparty in a particular swap, including the trading parties themselves.

Timing

The token sale will take place beginning on August 21.

Token Distribution

We are creating a fixed supply of one hundred million (100M) tokens, to be allocated are as follows:

• 50% to be made available in the initial token sale (to be used only for operations) 
• 25% retained as incentives for the Catalyst community 
• 25% distributed to the Enigma team and advisors (current and future) and retained by Enigma

Use of funds

Funds raised through the token sale will be used as follows: 

• 60% – Product and Technology Development 
• 15% – Blockchain Research 
• 10% – Marketing Purposes 
• 10% – Operations 
• 5% – Legal and Administrative Costs 

For more details, you may click the following link: https://blog.enigma.co/announcing-enigma-catalysts-token-sale-9c699cd5c72a

Roadmap

Team

Guy Zyskind – Co-founder & CEO 

Can Kisagun – Co-founder & CPO 

Tor Bair – Head of Growth and Marketing 

Vicor Grau Serrat – Senior Software Engineer 

Conner Fromknecht – Software Engineer

Conclusion

For me, the key issue with the team had been non -responsiveness in their Telegram chat, while Catalyst has many interesting offerings, there are many other open Python projects, without an ICO, that can provide a much better and controlled hedge fund strategy platform compared to what Catalyst can provide. Also, their MVP and testnet can only be ready by Q1 2018. Right now, Catalyst runs on Python 2.7 which is a highly customized version of it but not Python 3.6 ready. I am not able to find a docker image to try their platform without going through a setup perdition on my Windows 7 which is not expected from an MIT alumni team. For me, whatever they are trying to leverage via the ECAT platform, I guess, can be done without it and not sure in which exchanges it will be listed as it is more of a utility coin. With similar offerings like Numeriai, it remains to be seen how well they fair in making their project a reality. But it goes without saying, their project if implemented and if gets better support from developers, data curators and traders interested in Quant strategies can find a great value for the crypto community and investors alike. 

References

• Website
• Whitepaper
• Slack
• Telegram
• Twitter
• Github
• Blog

Disclaimer: This is not investment or trading advice, always do your own independent research.