Key Project Data
Name of project:
“Ocean Vantage | Signal Syndication and Data Network (SSDN)”
Download the Powerpoint pitch for this proposal
Team Website:
https://vantagecrypto.com (Company)
https://coinmarketflow.com (CMF) (API Data portal and advanced screener)
https://triggers.vantagecrypto.com (Cryptohopper Integration)
https://signals.vantagecrypto.com (Our analytics & signaling platform)
*Beta, private access only, we are currently looking for engaged beta testers! Discord
Proposal Wallet Address: 0x630cc8ffc2041b7C3E85892e2052b89BCC790454
First time or returning project:
We are already building on the Ocean Protocol and are just wrapping up the completion of the open source databridge which expands the Ocean Protocols data-streaming to service Webhook and API feeds as well. We also have forked the Ocean Protocol Marketplace as the Signal Syndication & Data Network (SSDN). Both repositories can be found here. >Ocean Vantage Open Source Data Bridge | Github
Signal Syndication & Data Network | Github
Current country of residence:
United States (Incorporated in Naples Florida)Total funds requested this round:
$17,600USDContact Email:
shawn.gregg@vantagecrypto.com | Foundersupport@vantagecrypto.com | Support
The proposal in one sentence:
Expand the reach of data streaming services for the Ocean Protocol network and use that framework to build a syndication network for real-time financial analytics catering to analysts that already have 100's or 1000's of monthly subscribers but need to extend their reach in servicing the more than 22 million active crypto traders (as of 2019).Which category best describes your project?
- Build / improve applications or integrations to Ocean
- Unleash data
Project Overview
We have made a short video that explains how everything works together and linked it above. Please watch the video for a quick understanding of what we are building on the Ocean Protocol, how it works, and how everyone benefits.
We recommend you take a moment to familiarize yourself with some related concepts, for context
Our end state will empower Jill and all the consumers of her data
Description of the project:
Spearheading the charge into streaming data support on the Ocean Network, we have already built an opensource “Ocean Vantage - Data Bridge” with previous DAO funding. The Open source data bridge extends the Ocean network streaming capability to Webhooks and API support which we need to cater to this industry. We now plan to use this framework to build a signal validator and integrated syndication network that will enable 100’s or 1000’s of quantitative analytics platforms to publish their validated signals to the market place and syndicate them across all the Ocean Marketplaces, connecting directly to the platforms that would consume them.
The SSDN will support sending live metric feeds and algorithmic signals via websocket, webhook or API and can convert any stream from one to the other. The wide variety of streaming data support enables signals to be consumed by many if not most automated trading platforms and bots. Trading platforms can also fork the SSDN to manage the process and fees themselves.
We have a demo data bridge site online now and we plan to offer a hosted databridge service for production use in the future. The bridge can convert from websocket to API, API to websocket, websocket to webhook or webhook to websocket. We have also forked the Ocean Marketplace and will be publishing our branded marketplace shortly. As soon as the Ocean Protocol starts accepting Websocket data feeds, we will start launching a series of live metric data feeds on the SSDN.
The SSDN focuses on the following data feeds
#1 An array of historic and live data-streams, ready to be consumed by any quantitative analytics platform, sourced from our API.
#2 Live real-time financial analytics streams, either from our own quantitative analytics platform or any other analytics platform. The signal syndication network will monitor signals and provide a market overlay for the marketplace to show potential consumers the reliability and performance data for each data stream before they purchase. We will use our quantitative analytics platform to become the first publisher on the SSDN and begin encouraging other analysts who have already expressed great interest in the signal syndication network to jump on board as well. We couple this with a campaign to push for automated trading platform integrations to facilitate large scale data consumption.
What problem is your project solving?
The slides below are helpful but this whiteboard video conveys a lot more in a lot less time.
What is the final product?
Phase1:
Ocean Vantage - Data Bridge (Open Source source code available to all projects integrating with the Ocean Protocol (Available and online now)
https://bridge.vantagecrypto.com/ (Will publish here once MVP code completed)
http://35.193.25.247 (Lab address, while under development)
Phase2:
Ocean Vantage Signal Syndication & Data Network (Ocean Marketplace Fork) | Initially hosting live streaming raw data feeds
(Forked and online shortly)
https://market.vantagecrypto.com/
Phase3/4:
Hosted data bridging and signal validation service
https://bridge.vantagecrypto.com & https://market.vantagecrypto.com
Phase5:
Integration with our Quantitative Analytics platform
https://signals.vantagecrypto.com/market
Driving value to the Ocean ecosystem/ROI
We believe projects like ours is exactly what will drive the bulk of transactions on Ocean Protocols as we tap into crypto sectors already rich in transaction traffic. We aren’t an individual publishing data, we aren’t just a company and its userbase publishing data-sets, the Signal Syndication & Data Network could usher in a vast and broad variety of publishers and consumers with a fairly large scale number of integrations, feeding DEFI and CEX markets alike.We are feeding the following fundamental metrics, in ranked order.
-Data consume volume
-Datatoken contracts
-Market WAU
It’s difficult to quantify what the user base will look like for the SSDN, Vantage Signals or the hosted data bridge with signal validator & publisher. We are still in beta and have not officially launched Vantage Signals to the public yet. We are quantitative analytics platform that generally is a at a layer between exchanges and automated trading platforms & bots. We are focused on more technical and inquisitive “Quant” customers and look to have a higher cost subscription with less users. We prefer a platform of 20,000 advanced analysts over running an automated trading platform of 250k users. The automated trading industry that we will be feeding has seen parabolic growth in this market. For example, when we first teamed with Cryptohopper to deliver Vantage Triggers, Cryptohopper had 50,000 users. Fast forward 6 months later and they are now sitting at 340,000 users! 3Commas was at 100,000 users in November 2020 and likely saw similar growth. The thing about this user base is that they are analytical, have money and are used to paying crypto for information to help them make better trades.
One of the big drivers for data consumption volume will be our push to make real-time signaling a consumable data-set. To grow our user base, we will be running marketing campaigns and bounties to promote usage and grow the platform and signal network. Our growth rate will be tied to our marketing and our marketing will be tied to our funding. We break down our anticipated user base with modest numbers that puts us at around 1/100th the user base of the two leading platforms outlined above. We base this user base off a conservative marketing budget as we search for seed funding. Our ability to fund and the amount we fund for will directly convey to the marketing campaign and infrastructure support and the user base we can anticipate.
We anticipate a public launch of Vantage-Signals in late 2021Q4, these projections provided below are starting from launch. When we show rolled up values at the bottom they assume an entire 4 quarters at the same performance as last quarter observed which also does not account for future growth but gives us a baseline of what yearly publications and subscriptions might look like after two years of operation.
We base usage off of the customers we would anticipate using our gateway to monitor and publish their signal to our SSDN and for the anticipated signal consumers. This does not account for all the usage that may occur via other data bridges and market places. We anticipate that 10% of the traffic will be publishers and 90% will be consumers.
We think most signal providers will start by using a set price but as their signals perform well they can make more money with dynamic subscription pricing which will produce staking. Our conservative numbers assess 40% of the providers will use AMM and the other 60% will use static pricing to retain their current price models. We think AMM usage will grow over time but we go ahead and assess 60% AMM usage in the moderate and aggressive models below. We assume an average cost of $25 per month per monthly consumption with repeat subscription users tempered this with a standard 75% renewal rate when calculating total consumptions.
Conservative projections:
We assess a modest 2400 analysts within two years of launch, we also assume that the other platforms will continue to contribute more and more signals outside of our own platform leading to increased usage observed in gateway/validator users. Below we highlight the customer acquisition costs based on one year of publications and consumption, by year two of operations. Our low overhead of ~$26,000 to deliver this solution makes customer acquisition costs look appealing even with our modest assessment. Keep in mind the numbers below are anticipated yearly numbers after two years of operation
- 4,600 new data-sets published yearly
- 94,000 data consumption per year
- $185k of OCEAN staked yearly
- $2.3M USD yearly Ocean Data Consuming Volume
- Acquisition cost per IDO Contract: $5.60
- Acquisition cost per IDO consumption: $0.28
- Acquisition cost per $100k Staking: $.14
- Acquisition cost per $1 network volume: $0.011
Moderate projections: 
But we don’t want to sell ourselves short. The projections above assumes a fairly limited repsonse bot for our own userbase and the general market as a whole which currently services more than 22 million crypto traders worldwide. We also provide alternative projections based on a few updated variables.
- 10k new data-sets published yearly
- 600k data-sets consumed yearly
- $600k OCEAN staked yearly
- $5M yearly Ocean Data Consuming Volume
- ~$16M USD in network transaction fees (volume*.0025)
- Acquisition cost per IDO Contract: $2.58
- Acquisition cost per IDO consumption: $0.04
- Acquisition cost per $100k Staking: $.043
- Acquisition cost per $1 network volume: $0.0051
Aggressive projections: 
Some recent studies put the number of active crypto traders over 22 million across the world. It is not impossible to imagine a world where the SSDN becomes the signal distribution network for crypto and we see millions of monthly consumptions. This is what it might look like in a world where there are just under 1 million publishers and consumers on the SSDN, less than 1/20th of the current trading community publishing or consuming signals.
- 365k new data-sets published yearly
- 25M data-sets consumed yearly
- $25M OCEAN staked yearly
- $184M yearly Ocean Data Consuming Volume
- ~$16M USD in network transaction fees (volume*.0025)
- Acquisition cost per IDO Contract: $0.07
- Acquisition cost per IDO consumption: $0.001
- Acquisition cost per $100k Staking: $.001
- Acquisition cost per $1 network volume: $0.0001
These numbers don't directly assess potential weekly users and integrations but over time there is a chance that dozens or 100's of trading platforms could fork the marketplace to support direct integration. We also see weekly users as likely a higher multiplier of our data gateway users which is projected between 2500 and 200k weekly users depending on which projections we use from above.
The actual number of users the SDDN user will see will be tightly correlated to our ability to effectively market the product. To effectively market the product will require marketing dollars we do not currently have. We are in the process of assembling all the documentation to raise a seed round of funding to enable us to meet our marketing needs to grow our user base more aggressively.
Project Deliverables
This project is broken up into phases and will request grant funding along the way to continue making progress on all our major milestones for this project. Below we break down the major phases/milestones of the project.
Phase1/Phase2: Completed or just wrapping up | requested $12k USD | actual budget used $14k USD
***THIS REQUEST FOR FUNDING IS for phase3 and phase 4
Total funds requested this round: $17,600 USD
We anticipate that Phase3/Phase4 which we are working in tandem, will require two rounds of funding from the Ocean DAO due to the limitations of monthly grant funding and the significance of this release. We anticipate retuning in two months for the last installment of funding for these two phases.
Breakdown of projected funding requests for this phase
- Phase1 & Phase2 deliverables: Stand up data gateway and marketplace fork | 20,000 OCEAN | Completed/Wrapping up
- Phase3 & Phase4 deliverables: Create signal validator interface on the SSDN. Increase functionality of the data bridge and incorporate API administration/management for remote data bridge creation and management. Create the signal validator service and incorporate it with the hosted data bridge solution. Launch hosted data bridging and signal validation services | Estimate: $28k-$34k USD
- Phase5 deliverables: Vantage Signals integration | Estimate: $4k-$6k USD
It should also be noted that with each of these initiatives, VantageCrypto will be maintaining operational costs of these solutions to include database, cluster resources, caching, load balancing, storage, backup, monitoring, etc.
It is actually VantageCrypto’s development arm “Vantage.Code.Labs” that will be developing and maintaining the code. VantageCrypto will be deploying and maintaining the infrastructure and support.
Is your software open-source?
The Ocean Vantage Data Bridge will be 100% open source and will be available for any project to extend the support for additional data-feeds beyond the WebSocket feeds supported natively by the Ocean Protocol network.The SSDN will be made easy to fork for trading platforms that want to syndicate and integrate directly, they can hit the ground running.
There are some great potential follow on components such as open source signal validators for parity in signal validation and an open source Signal Trader.
We have an assortment of python bots online and open source which can be viewed in our public repo. Our public repo: VantageCrypto Opensource Gitlab
We also have the open source Ocean Vantage Data Bridge that was funded by the last round of funding. Ocean Vantage Open Source Data Bridge | Github
Data Unleashed:
Project Details
Vantagecrypto already has a focus on making data modular and affordable with our "Modular API Data Services". We have a large array of API data and we continue to expand its metrics and data flexibility.
VantageCrypto manages a robust cloud infrastructure and a small but powerful colo-facility. We currently manage over 70 cloud and local/VM servers. Much of our infrastructure uses Docker and Kubernetes containers/pods. Below is an overview of our current architecture including proposed updates.
Our Vantage Signals Quantitative Analytics and Signaling platform is online now and is a revolutionary new approach to collaborative market analytics
Team members
There are a few important points to note here. We are all contractors, our entire company is outsourced, each and every one of us. We work what is needed of us and don’t bleed full-time pay where most these roles don’t require full time work. Almost all of our part-time contract labor also have another full time job they are working. The exceptions to the above are our developers of which are full time and a couple of back office resources. All back office resources are working on sweat equity alone. 100% of grant proceeds goes to our developers!
Shawn Gregg
Role: Founder, everything from marketing to software design to architecture to project management and business development.Relevant Credentials (e.g.):
Extensive career and certifications in IT, engineering and project management
Background/Experience:
Founder of Hashcoop, the largest Scrypt mining facility in North America (During the first crypto winter).
Have worked large scale project such as the new NATO headquarters in Belgium, Standing up initial infrastructure for a new US COCOM in Africa and E&I for a country wide MPLS network in Afghanistan.
Have been building development teams, designing software and managing the project through to delivery for an array of websites and services.
- VCDepth (CoinMarketFlow(dot)com)
- Vantage API (https://coinmarketflow(dot)com/subnscriptions)
- Vantage Triggers (triggers(dot)vantagecrypto(dot)com)
- VCTrack (vctrack(dot)io / shutdown(for now))
- VCHealth (vchealth(dot)io / Discontinued)
- VCReal/Trudomo (Trudomo(dot)com / Shutdown(for now))
- VCFreelancer (vcfreelancer(dot)com/ Discontinued)
- VCBNB (vcbnb(dot)com/ Discontinued)
- VCStay (vcstay(dot)com/ / Discontinued)
- VCPool (Private mining pools solution for HashCoop)
Ryan Purdy:
Role: Chief Technical Officer, Engineering & Implementation and assist to O&M. Extensive product testing and awareness, business development.Relevant Credentials (e.g.):
Extensive career and certifications in IT, engineering and project management
Background/Experience:
3 years of working with the VantageCrypto Initiative helping drive infrastructure and solutions for the following software packages
- VCDepth (CoinMarketFlow(dot)com)
- Vantage API (https://coinmarketflow(dot)com/subnscriptions)
- Vantage Triggers (triggers(dot)vantagecrypto(dot)com)
- VCTrack (vctrack(dot)io / shutdown(for now))
- VCHealth (vchealth(dot)io / Discontinued)
- VCReal/Trudomo (Trudomo(dot)com / Shutdown(for now))
- VCFreelancer (vcfreelancer(dot)com/ Discontinued)
- VCBNB (vcbnb(dot)com/ Discontinued)
- VCStay (vcstay(dot)com/ / Discontinued)
- VCPool (Private mining pools solution for HashCoop)
Alex Menendez:
Role: Chief Operations Officer, more than a decade of Operations support experience along with some engineering and implementation. Alex manages basic support of the infrastructure such as monitoring and patch management as well as managing our customer support solutions such as our ticket system and related incidents.Relevant Credentials (e.g.):
Extensive career and certifications in IT, operations and engineering
Background/Experience: 3 years of working with the VantageCrypto Initiative helping drive infrastructure and solutions for the following software packages
- VCDepth (CoinMarketFlow(dot)com)
- Vantage API (https://coinmarketflow(dot)com/subnscriptions)
- Vantage Triggers (triggers(dot)vantagecrypto(dot)com)
- VCTrack (vctrack(dot)io / shutdown(for now))
- VCHealth (vchealth(dot)io / Discontinued)
- VCReal/Trudomo (Trudomo(dot)com / Shutdown(for now))
- VCFreelancer (vcfreelancer(dot)com/ Discontinued)
- VCBNB (vcbnb(dot)com/ Discontinued)
- VCStay (vcstay(dot)com/ / Discontinued)
- VCPool (Private mining pools solution for HashCoop)
Arvin Bullock:
Role: Chief Financial Officer, Retired military comptroller with 20 years of finance experience. Currently serves as the treasurer on the board of directors for a local non-profit and he and his wife run their own Yoga studio.
Relevant Credentials (e.g.):
Extensive career in finance and managing large budgets
M.B.S. in finance M.B.A. in Executive Leadership
Linkedin
Background/Experience:
3 years of working with the VantageCrypto Initiative helping drive infrastructure and solutions for the following software packages
- VCDepth (CoinMarketFlow(dot)com)
- Vantage API (https://coinmarketflow(dot)com/subnscriptions)
- Vantage Triggers (triggers(dot)vantagecrypto(dot)com)
- VCTrack (vctrack(dot)io / shutdown(for now))
- VCHealth (vchealth(dot)io / Discontinued)
- VCReal/Trudomo (Trudomo(dot)com / Shutdown(for now))
- VCFreelancer (vcfreelancer(dot)com/ Discontinued)
- VCBNB (vcbnb(dot)com/ Discontinued)
- VCStay (vcstay(dot)com/ / Discontinued)
- VCPool (Private mining pools solution for HashCoop)
Lawrence Wesley:
Role: Chief Executive Officer, Microsoft Executive, served as Commanding Officer for DISA, the global comms provider for the US Military. Wes currently provides executive leadership to Architect resources at Microsoft as his primary job. We leverage Wes as needed until such time that the role needs him and that we can financially support a move from Microsoft to Vantage full time.
Relevant Credentials (e.g.):
Microsoft executive, also served as an Executive Officer (XO) for DISA (Defense Information Systems Agency
M.B.A. in Business Administration (summa cum laude); M.Sc.I.T. in Government Information Systems.
Linkedin
Background/Experience:
3 years of working with the VantageCrypto Initiative helping drive infrastructure and solutions for the following software packages
- VCDepth (CoinMarketFlow(dot)com)
- Vantage API (https://coinmarketflow(dot)com/subnscriptions)
- Vantage Triggers (triggers(dot)vantagecrypto(dot)com)
- VCTrack (vctrack(dot)io / shutdown(for now))
- VCHealth (vchealth(dot)io / Discontinued)
- VCReal/Trudomo (Trudomo(dot)com / Shutdown(for now))
- VCFreelancer (vcfreelancer(dot)com/ Discontinued)
- VCBNB (vcbnb(dot)com/ Discontinued)
- VCStay (vcstay(dot)com/ / Discontinued)
- VCPool (Private mining pools solution for HashCoop)
Alexander Carrington and Alexander Dreyer
Two new additions to the team, Alex Dreyer is just wrapping up his PhD in Neuroscience and Alex Carrington has extensive infrastructure engineering and project management experience. Both have been brought on to the team to ramp up our initiative to fully fund and staff and move our project from project to production.Extensive development resources
Not shown in detail are our development staff. We do not share the full details of all of our developers as this would put our project at risk for poachers. While we have some developers that have been with us for the full three years we have been building and they like the project, we can’t afford to pay our developers what some of these other cash rich large projects can afford to pay. The majority of our developers are Ukrainian and Russian, we find eastern block developers are a great balance of skill and value in most cases. We pull from three development resources.All of our teams have extensive experience in various PHP frameworks and in-depth python scripting skills. We have additional Java/React resources on our Ukraine team but we primarily push some sort of PHP framework with VUE and python based cli for our current solutions.
Team Russia:
Managing the Signals project, this team is small but growing, 1 full time fullstack dev and one part time, we are also bringing on a part-time front end developer to this team.Team Ukraine:
Managing the CMF and API projects, we have 2 full time full stack devs, one part time front end dev, one part time designer, one part time QA. At one time we had 8 full time developers on this team. For this team we use a development staffing solution that allows us to plus up with resources temporarily while we search for long term resources. We have numerous other devs available to us who have worked on our projects before, this team is really easy to scale.Team Upwork:
We hire a lot of adhoc developers through Upwork and often time use trivial projects as a method for evaluating developers for joining our larger initiatives. We also use Upwork for handling billing for existing devs where cross border payments are more difficult to manage. We have a decent sized pool of developers we have worked with here and can also surge talent on demand on this platform.Additional Information
We have looked for the right relationship for some time and after finding Ocean Protocol and digging in we couldn’t be more excited. The more we dig, the more we realize this isn’t a good fit, this is A GREAT FIT, perhaps even a PERFECT FIT. We love the way the glove fits for Vantage & Ocean and we see a future where we are so tightly integrated that the lines between our products and services are nearly indistinguishable.We look forward to dominating data with the Ocean Protocol! **Note, there are forward looking statements in this proposal, all made with good faith but with difficult to assess future variables such as regulatory, technological developments in the space, ability to secure future funding and execute.