Key Project Data
Name of project:
“Vantage Data Marketplace” & integration with “Vantage Signals” market analytics and signaling platform
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
Current country of residence:
United States (Incorporated in Naples Florida)Contact Email:
shawn.gregg@vantagecrypto.com | Foundersupport@vantagecrypto.com | Support
The proposal in one sentence:
Facilitate data offerings, staking and data consumption on the Ocean Protocol network by empowering users with the ability to analyze any numerical data on the Ocean Protocol network and monetize their processed analytical datasets through an Ocean streamlined Analytics platform.*Note this isn’t one user consuming and publishing data, this is not one company publishing and consuming data, this is an entire platforms userbase that will be able to consume and publish content.
Which category best describes your project?
- Build / improve applications or integrations to Ocean
- Unleash data
Project Overview
Description of the project:
The primary focus of this initiative is to standup and integrate the Ocean Marketplace into our Vantage Signals platform, eventually enabling any user to consume any numerical data from the Ocean Protocol network and begin performing analysis on it.
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.
***THIS REQUEST FOR FUNDING IS ONLY FOR PHASE #1
Phase #1 Stand up Vantage Data Marketplace
We will fork the Ocean marketplace and stand up our own decentralized marketplace @ https://market(dot)vantagecrypto(dot)com.
- Fork code
- Stand up pre-production server
- Brand frontend
- Add basic integration such as marketplace menu options in CMF, option in our modular API interface to buy bulk data through the marketplace, and Vantage data filter option for example.
- Publish a subset of our data in bulk flat files
- Push out social media broadcasts, run banners on CMF and promote
We have already had one of our devs pull the marketplace code, build it and make sure they felt comfortable updating this for our branding and handful of small updates and integrations. Normally we need to design all the specifications and break down sprints before can put an accurate timeframe and cost associated to deliverables. Only because its new code to us and we haven’t properly deconstructed this as we normally would, we are setting this milestone at 1 month after funding and we anticipate total costs to complete phase 1 at around $3,600 USD.
Phase #2 Integrate Vantage Data Marketplace into the Vantage Signals Platform
This milestone has two major components, integration of the marketplace into the signals interface and then the development and implementation of the ability to publish a brute force back test directly to the marketplace.
For the marketplace integration we are simply adding a tab on our data analytics platform where users can interface with the Vantage Data Marketplace. We do need to evaluate the approach here as we want to avoid having to maintain two forks of the code.
For the ability to push out a brute force analysis report to the marketplace, this will take some work to handle everything from the data-submission to publishing and staking. We will offer a separate filter option on the marketplace so signal users can browse these reports and pays some reasonable rate to buy a copy from the user who published it. This could come in very handy for example where a user may want to run an in-depth million combination back tests on a particular asset with particular metrics which could take days to run or they could pay $5-$50 for a copy of the analysis another user has already performed and access the results instantly. These datasets could also be used outside of Signals for those who take the time to understand our CLI. This incentivizes our Signal users to perform analysis and publish it on the Ocean Protocol network for additional residual income.
Without having built out specifications for this yet and decomposing those specifications, we don’t have a timeframe for this yet but we anticipate that this phase will take around 6 weeks for implementation based on projected workload across all of our projects. We will absolutely need to create specifications and break down man hours and sprints before we can properly assess timeframe and costs for the build but we believe this phase can be completed for around $10,000 - $12,000 USD.
- Integrate the Vantage Data Marketplace into Vantage Signals
- Enable users to publish and price or stake, brute force back-test analysis directly to the marketplace and make a filter for browsing just these reports.
Phase #3 Import and Analyze Select data (Alpha indicator workshop)
This is a great milestone that lays the foundation for the future of VantageCrypto/VCL and Ocean Protocol’s long term relationship and opens the door to broaden the scope of the Signals platform. We will absolutely need to create specifications and break down man hours and sprints before we can properly assess timeframe and costs for the build but we believe this phase can be completed for less than $15,000VantageCrypto will build a tool that enables us to consume some data off the marketplace and make a custom indicator just for that data. We will prep several datasets for integration and enable users the ability to simply buy/consume the data and import the new indicator. Users will immediately be able to consume and back test select datasets that VantageCrypto has prepared with the click of a button in the Vantage Data Marketplace. Estimated timeframe for delivery, 6 weeks.
- Develop rudimentary tool for Ocean Protocol data extraction and indicator creation for internal use
- Identify a subset of VantageCrypto and non-VantageCrypto data-sets and enable users to consume it from the marketplace and immediately start testing it.
Phase #4 Launch Indicator Workshop
We will expand the scope of data sets the workshop can handle and extend additional indicator controls to be able to discern and differentiate data in a broader capacity, build out a user friendly interface and integrate it seamlessly into the Signals platform. This is enough of an undertaking to be broken off from the phase three milestone which birthed the framework for this feature. Estimated timeframe for delivery, 4-6 weeks. We will absolutely need to create specifications and break down man hours and sprints before we can properly assess timeframe and costs for the build but we believe this phase can be completed for less than $20,000- Provide interface that enables users to consume any numerical data from the Ocean Protocol network and build a custom indicator for it and start testing that data
Phase #5 Analytics on Demand (Compute to Data)
There are two forms of “compute to data” that we will support. One is where we ourselves offer a user the ability to request data analysis, fund the compute and data and then we will process the data and provide the user with the report. Later we look to leverage STORJ and publish via S3: to STORJ and provide users with the private key for the decentralized storage space that houses the results.There is also the native “Compute to Data” offered by the Ocean Protocol network. We will be building up a large public repository of Brute force analysis through our Collaborative Analytics Interface (CAI). We do things like subsidize users to publish their reports to our public repo. We will allow outside analytics companies to use the Ocean “Compute to Data” feature to process these reports on premises and pull back their data analytics without actually gaining control of our large public repository of reports. Estimated delivery, 6 weeks.
**This milestone focuses only on the first implementation of compute to data where as we offer our users or anonymous users the ability to request a job to be processed on demand and the ability to keep that report to themselves or publish it to the market place.
- Integrate ability for user to request a processing job on demand
- Automated processing jobs will provide the ability to publish results to the data marketplace
- Stage Ocean Protocol "Compute to data" integration
It should also be noted that with each of these initiatives, VantageCrpto will be maintaining operational costs of these solutions to include database, cluster resources, caching, load balancing, storage, backup, monitoring, etc.
To start we are only requesting a small amount of grant money. This first round of grant money will cover some or all of the development costs for our initial phase which is estimated at around $3600USD. If the grant is set at $10k then we will simply roll the rest of the funds over to phase two and continue working while we await a second round of DAO funding.
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.
What problem is your project solving?
There is an array of problems we are solving for analysts, Ocean Protocol and for VantageCrypto.General Problem for Analysts:
Market Analytics users need as much data made available to them as possible and they need that data to be easily analyzed beyond the capacity of what a human could possibly perform.
General Solution for Analysts:
Provide an analytics platform that can use a brute force testing engine to crunch any numbers thrown at it and spit out comprehensive reports. Feed the analytics platform with a near endless supply of data sourced from a decentralized data marketplace that has easy to consume datasets and that is constantly growing its available datasets.
For Ocean and Vantage we highlight our mutual problems and solutions below.
What is the final product?
End results after all the phases outlined will be the following products and integrationsPhase#1
htttps://market(dot)vantagecrypto(dot)com (Vantage Data Marketplace)
*This will also be cross linked with https://coinmarketflow(dot)com/subscriptions
*This will also be linked on https://VantageCrypto(dot)com
Phase#2
https://signals(dot)vantagecrypto(dot)com/market
Phase#3,4
https://signals(dot)vantagecrypto(dot)com/market (Integrated marketplace with actionable data-sets)
https://signals(dot)vantagecrypto(dot)com/workshop (Indicator Workshop)
**This will also be integrated in various parts of https://signals(dot)vantagecrypto(dot)com
Phase#5
https://signals(dot)vantagecrypto(dot)com/aod (Analytics on demand interface)
*This will also be cross linked with https://signals(dot)vantagecrypto(dot)com/market
*This will also be linked on https://VantageCrypto(dot)com
Driving value to the Ocean ecosystem/ROI
We believe projects like ours is exactly what will drive the bulk of Ocean Protocols data growth. We aren’t an individual publishing data, we aren’t just a company publishing non-persistent data-sets, we are a platform that makes nearly every piece of numerical based Ocean Data consumable by anyone while simultaneously encouraging analysts using our analytics platform to share their findings by monetizing them on the Ocean Protocol network via the Vantage Data Marketplace.It’s difficult to quantify what the userbase will look like for Vantage Signals and by proxy, the Vantage Data Marketplace. We are still in beta and have not officially launched Vantage Signals to the public yet. We are so much more than an automated trading platform but if we look at a couple of leading trading platforms, the growth in this market is parabolic right now. 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 userbase is that they are analytical, have money and are used to paying money 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 signalling a consumable dataset. To grow our user base, we will be running marketing campaigns and bounties to promote usage and grow the platform, our growth rate will be tied to our marketing and our marketing will be tied to our funding. We break down our anticipated userbase with modest numbers that puts us at around 1/100th the userbase of the two leading platforms outlined above. We base this userbase 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 userbase we can anticipate.
We anticipate a public launch of Vantage-Signals in 2021Q4, these projections are starting from launch.
The latest survey and studies in 2020 show that the average conversion rate of e-commerce websites is 2.86%
Conservative projections:
We estimate on the low side with a 1.43% conversion rate which is half of the industry standard for e-commerce. We modestly project only 3000 users over a two-year period. We project an average publisher will publish 1 publication per month and the average consumer will consume 5 data-sets per month. We assume that 60% of the users publishing data will prefer to price it and not use AMM services and so not increasing the amount of OCEAN that is staked. We also assume that the average data publisher will stake their publication with $100 worth of OCEAN and without co-stakers. Using these conservative numbers, we project the following yearly numbers by the end of year 2.
- 858 new data-sets published yearly
- 3680820 data consumptions per year
- $34,320 of OCEAN staked yearly
- $92M USD yearly Ocean Data Consuming Volume
- ~$230k USD in network transaction fees (volume*.0025)
Aggressive projections: 
But we don’t want to sell ourselves short. The projections above assumes that after two years we will have less than 1% the userbase of one of the leading automated trading platform which excludes our potential use beyond such purposes. We also provide alternative projections based on a few updated variables. The below assumes that we will have 20,000 users by the end of two years, that we will experience the industry standard 2.86% conversion rate, 60% of the publishers will use AMM pricing and data-sets will be co-staked on average 5x the base value or $500 additional dollars per data set. Some of these projections are lofty against industry standard growth patterns but we could also see greater amount of publishing per publisher and greater consumption from users, we just don’t have a way to establish this baseline until we are there. We also know crytpo is anything but industry standard where viral growth is common place.
- 11440 new data-sets published yearly
- 327M data-sets consumed yearly
- $1,029,800 USD of OCEAN staked yearly
- $6.5B yearly Ocean Data Consuming Volume
- ~$16M USD in network transaction fees (volume*.0025)
The actual number of users we have 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 userbase more aggressively.
Project Deliverables
Phase#1 (This round of funding)
Phase#2 (Next round of funding (Anticipated funds request June 2021))
Phase#3 & 4 (Anticipated funds request August 2021)
Phase#5 (Anticipated funds request October 2021)
*This will also be linked on https://VantageCrypto(dot)com
Is your software open-source?
This Marketplace being an OCEAN fork, we don’t see any reason we wouldn’t keep it public. CoinMarketFlow and our API back end is all private code, we have made some parts of Vantage-Signals command line bots available as open source but the bulk of Vantage Signals is private code. We may or may not look at methods to make Vantage Signals open-source. We are already building it to work in a an environment that supports user interactions between disparate servers/installations.Our public repo: Vantagecrypto Opensource Gitlab
Data Unleashed:
Project Deliverables – Roadmap
See the project roadmap outlined in the above section and graphic. Once we approach the beginning of each major milestone we will produce specifications and make more precise assessments of budget and timeline for delivery. The roadmap outlined below is without thorough project breakdowns and may adjust slightly as we present each request for funding at each phase.We have not started on this project yet. We have pulled the marketplace, built it and performed a super quick assessment to ensure we had the skills needed to support working with the marketplace fork.
- Note some features may change as we approach each phase based on the capabilities of the Ocean Protocol network. For example, support for API subscriptions to access datasets could enable us to signal based on real time data on top of analyzing historical data from the Ocean Protocol network and creating demand for subscription data.
- We do not see this roadmap as the path to the end of development and integration with the Ocean Protocol network but rather, the beginning. It is our goal that we will be able to proceed with further integration and capabilities the following year without support from the Ocean DAO.
Project Details
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.
We haven’t delved deep into developing the specifications of the future software packages yet. Once we know that the Ocean Project is committed to supporting this initiative we can start to funnel more resources into providing in-depth specifications and details regarding the builds for each phase as we approach them. Below is a mockup very similar to what the marketplace integration with our Vantage Signals platform will look like once we reach phase 5 of this proposal.
Team members
There are a few important points to note here. We are all contractors, each and every one of us. We work what is needed of us and don’t bleed fulltime 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 contractors and the original founder who isn’t charging for services.
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!