Numerai and Erasure: trust through staking

Data is the new oil, which is a huge advantage for prominent technology companies like Facebook, Google, Twitter and others. Before the Cambridge Analytica data scandal, people hardly understood how much influence can be gained by analyzing their data on social media. As time goes, technological progress will allow algorithms to extract even more information from the same data, for example, for better ad targeting.

In the financial world, making a profit from data is no exception. The popularization of quantitative finance in the late 90s led to the emergence of many financial companies trusting algorithms to manage their capital. In the last five years, investment funds have been urgently collecting price data and are now starting to extract alpha from alternative data.