American Prediction Market Startup Numerai (NMR) Raises $11 Million In An ICO

In the latest digital currency news, we are focusing on one American market startup and hedge fund named Numerai (NMR) and its recent initial coin offering (ICO) in which the startup managed to raise $11 million. The aim of the money raised was the launch of a new project named Erasure, according to the company’s announcement on Twitter yesterday.

Numerai was first launched in 2016 under the Numeraire network, which provides a blockchain and a cryptographic token-based ecosystem that incentivizes anonymous data scientists to create predictive models. It is based on the Ethereum (ETH) blockchain and uses its tokens for trading in market predictions within the startup’s platform.

According to the founder of Numerai, Richard Craib, the funds from the recent ICO will mostly be spent on hiring and training new engineers for Erasure which is a decentralized unit of Numerai’s marketplace.

Speaking of, Erasure is scheduled to launch later in 2019. Once it is launched, it will allow users to sell their predictions to investment funds through a public network – and the peer-to-peer InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) – with the main aim of converting their crypto wallets to the Ethereum-based marketplace, according to Craib’s statement.

A partner named Joel Monegro has given a statement, explaining why his firm Placeholder wanted to invest through tokens and not equity. He said:

“The way we think of our investing in decentralized crypto networks is underwriting, capitalizing the network. … As more people come to buy and sell data from each other, the role of big financial investors like ourselves diminishes over time. Then we can gradually begin to exit our position as the network becomes self-sustaining.”

Monegro also said that Erasure will take the complete Numerai idea to development – in its own fund that will crowdsource insights incentivized by token rewards and in that manner use it to “break open the investment market.”

Led by VC and private equity firm Placeholder, the ICO round also included the crypto investment company Paradigm that was founded by Coinbase’s co-founder Fred Ehrsam. After the news went live, the price of the Nomeraire token surged by 19% and is now trading at $5.77 at press time, according to new data from CoinMarketCap.

The token is currently available on five markets including Bittrex, UPbit, Poloniex, DDEX, and IDEX. The total market capitalization at the moment is $7.7 million.