When someone decides to invest in the traditional financial market, they usually rely on an advisor who analyzes the best options and indicates the most promising alternatives. However, this is not always possible in the crypto market, once there are more than ten thousand crypto assets, each with its own characteristics, which directly impact volatility and appreciation potential.
One of the barometers for investing is to follow the market, which includes pricing and news from the specialized and traditional media, and social networks and events in the crypto universe. Trendy tokens have more significant potential for appreciation. Thus, for most people interested in the sector, identifying opportunities is one of the entrance barriers.
By that reasoning, Hamilton Haskel and Kevin Voigt, founders of Kassandra Finance, developed the project to identify trends and suggest the best investment options.
The company wants to bring to Brazil the first decentralized ETF based on data. “Kassandra is a manager of decentralized products. A good parallel to be made would be with something like XP for the crypto market”, Voigt said.
With a background in physics (hence the interest in data analysis) and a lot of creativity, the creators of the Kassandra protocol, created on the Avalanche network, promise to improve users’ experience with decentralized financial products (DeFi). The first product is the “Avalanche Social Index”, whose indexing will be done in partnership with the startup Heimdall, responsible for collecting data on social media.
Check out in this exclusive interview with PanoramaCrypto the vision of the founders of the project on cryptoassets, and how the initiative can contribute to the market. According to them, the great benefit is to allow investors with less knowledge about the market to make good, data-based choices.
What is the difference of having an intelligence factor behind investment decisions?
It makes all the difference. To have security in crypto investment and the care with the blockchain choice, it is essential to follow up the market. Thus, we propose to identify the most commented activities in the social communities, especially on Twitter. Based on that, we create a “social score”, which shows which currencies are most active. We want to bring to Brazil the first exchange-traded fund (ETF) in the sector based on such data.
You can browse your social media all the time, looking for what people are talking about, or let a system evaluate it for you, automatically investing in the most mentioned currencies, and consequently more promising.
What is the concept of this new ETF?
In the traditional market, it is prevalent for investors to hand over the custody of their money to experts, mathematicians, analysts, among other specialized professionals who define where to invest their money. Kassandra does precisely that, but for the DeFi world. The protocol can direct, with data and through smart contracts, where a person will allocate their money and integrate an intelligent strategy. But, it is essential to remember that the capital does not remain in our custody.
Another detail is that Kassandra’s strategy is active. That is, we will not indicate a fixed investment but rather change your allocation, with an intelligence factor behind it.
Will the ETF be based only on data?
No, our token holders will also choose the assets, and they can vote on the ones they consider relevant. But they don’t choose the strategy itself. Who holds the token ($KACY) contributes to the management of the financial products. Heimdall does the data intelligence part.
So the protocol will choose the ten tokens with the best social activity over the last thirty days, using Heimdall’s scores, and making a weighted investment in each, according to the scores.
Since Kassandra proposes to identify trends, what can they say about market prospects?
It is difficult to anticipate a boom, but we can measure what is being talked about. An example of this was when NFTs started to stand out, and we were able to identify a trend. The idea is to bring to our audience the decentralized strategy, allowing the client to have a kind of radar of everything arousing interest in the market.
Can other companies use this market intelligence proposal?
Yes, the Kassandra protocol manages user investments. Any company that depends on off-chain data to drive its strategy can use our project.
Our plan is that Kassandra can scale much further than just for products to invest through social data, including many other investment theses. Our focus is on managing this social data, but we can also manage any other theme, for any other type of data. In other words, any fund provider can launch strategies with us.
Are there risks in this automatic data identification process?
Of course, there are. There is no certainty that a given solution will generate income “for the rest of your life”. Thus, the choice is up to our user, who needs to verify whether the strategy is valid according to his concepts and principles. Our tests proved to be very efficient in this strategy. It is up to the user to interpret the data and put it into perspective. It is essential to understand that there is no easy money, no investment strategy that makes sense for any moment in the market. Conditions change rapidly. We propose to identify the trends as soon as possible.
What are the prospects for decentralized finance?
There are countless. The DeFi works like great lego pieces that fit. Our protocol did not start from scratch because we had inspiration from other projects and forked some codes. We put together a lot of solutions, but we’ve modified and developed a lot of things, especially in the governance and management part. We take advantage of the amount of open code and analyze the best solutions, not starting from scratch. However, all of them were modified and developed.
Today, our differential allows intelligent strategies to be imported into the decentralized world. Kassandra enables you to create these strategies by investing in socially active ones. This is a highly complex operation, with secure but not under custody contracts, which makes the person know that he is always in control, with the security of acting intelligently.
How does the project governance work?
Governance works similarly to every DAO but with some unique details. Holders of our governance token, KACY, can stake it for different lock-in periods and gain voting power.
Those with voting power can engage by proposing and voting on proposals that adjust or change the ecosystem. As governance should not only be about responsibilities, taking part in it also has rewards in various ways. One of them is that whenever a user makes redemption of an investment, a 3% fee goes straight to governance.
Where did the name of the project, Kassndra, come from?
Cassandra is a character from Greek mythology, a woman who could see the future but was given a curse, which made people not believe in her visionary ideas. Also, the Twitter alias for Kassandra is attributed to the person who managed to detect the 2008 ‘bubble’. Therefore, we think that this name is ‘prophetic’.