What does your company do?
Elpis will be the first hybrid quantitative trading company totally driven by Artificial Intelligence. It will exploit Blockchain technology to bridge the gap between old and new finance by trading both crypto and traditional assets, offering the service to both institutional and retail clients. On one side, Elpis will launch a Fund for Institutional clients — on the other, Elpis’ goal is to provide trading signals to retail clients. Moreover, both Institutional and Retail clients will have the access to our platform, built to bridge our internal activities with a comprehensible control panel that requires little to no intervention, since the trading is completely automated.
What problem are you solving?
The world of hedge fund trading and finance is due to a shake-up and we will see several problems that Elpis will help solve.
Access: Unlike traditional hedge funds and trading systems that are built for the few, Elpis systems and platform will be available to institutional investors as well as retail investors. Our clients, even the ones with no trading expertise, will be able to get access to our trading signals and mirror our trades allowing them to effectively manage their crypto-assets with more efficiency and safety. All participants in the ICO will have 1-year free access to our trading signals and thereafter, will be able to use ELP tokens to pay for continued access.
Transparency: We believe in radical transparency. This is different from the current status-quo where financial institutions keep their technological advantage for themselves or for the top 1% of the population. Our objective is to show each and every trade and transaction we make, registered on our Public Blockchain Ledger, so every client will be able to clearly see returns and activity of our company.
Expertise: The volatility of Bitcoin and the lack of fundamentals prevent any type of analysis on Bitcoin and crypto assets in general. Therefore, we believe a much more experienced solution for crypto trading, as there is for traditional assets, is needed to avoid volatility and technological problems. In Elpis, we put our expertise in service of our clients to solve problems related to crypto trading by using technologies like artificial intelligence.
Cost and Efficiency: Artificial Intelligence is at our core, our technology removes human bias for greater efficiency and a lower risk for clients, with higher returns. Tracking the last 10 years, our models outperformed the S&P consistently and in the last 5 months of trading, we have seen a return of over 40% in our hybrid balanced portfolio with cryptocurrencies and traditional assets.
What are the major challenges for your business?
Today, fund management suffers from high and increasing barriers to entry. Accurate audibility of portfolios has also traditionally been very difficult. Long settlement times often lead to delayed information and can unveil ‘errors’ when it is too late to fix them. Too much reliance on a long chain of humans in the process of booking, reconciling and settling trades creates room for messy errors that often go unmentioned. The success and security of a fund, therefore, rely on the existence of high working capital, the accuracy of its people and the solvency of the custodians it works with. At Elpis, we are leveraging state-of-art technologies in order to automatise these processes and reduce potential errors in the chain.
How are you changing the world?
Finance more than any industry requires renewed openness, transparency, fairness and trust. Leveraging new technologies is not only an opportunity but a moral choice if we agree that the goal of financial products is to bring returns to investors, rather than keep enabling an unfair and uncontested control of financial institutions. The mission of Elpis is to grow together with visionary people like us who believe in the opportunities created by innovative and new technologies. Innovation, transparency, real-time responses to market changes, and above all fairness are Elpis’ driving principles that will contribute in making a major impact to change the current financial world, and specifically, the current status-quo, developing a new order within a newer, distributed and fairer financial ecosystem.
Do you see your company is a disruptor or a collaborator?
We obviously see our company as a disruptor, mainly for combining under one roof the advantages of using Artificial Intelligence with Blockchain, with the objective of solving the problems that affect the asset management and trading industry with Efficiency, Security, Transparency, and Expertise!
Elpis mission is to be a leader in the Trading and Blockchain space by operating with more efficiency than the average trading firm, working only on performance, and by building an organisation and a structure totally open and transparent for our customers. The final objective is to give access to our trading and fund management technologies now in hands of few, to the masses.
Why blockchain?
Over the past 20 years, capital markets have made significant technological improvements, but today middle and back office functions often remain slow and inefficient due to processes involving many counterparts, manual tasks, and third-party service providers. Blockchain enabled distributed ledgers have already proven effective in making capital markets transactions more transparent, secure, quick and efficient, mainly because they eliminate traditional “bottlenecks” of centralised financial institutions. Blockchain technologies have the power to improve asset management with faster settlement times, lower collateral requirements and counterparty risk, greater transparency in regulatory reporting and other critical areas.
Elpis, during the first 2 years, will use blockchain to publicly show and verify every trade and settlement with customers and regulators and to efficiently save costs of infrastructure. The management structure will be more transparent and safe so that investors will know exactly where their money is really going, on a daily basis, with dividend structures and costs calculated automatically and with no room for errors. Every transaction will be certified on the blockchain to recognise precisely what was invested and who holds the public ID wallet. This will allow us to easily and safely track each investors’ equity in the fund and the rewards/interests coming from trading activities.
Where do you see yourselves in 3 years? And where do you see blockchain tech in 3 years?
In 3 years we expect to be a major protagonist in the crypto-assets management and trading industry by building a trading company whose main objective is to bridge the gap between old and new finance, by trading both crypto and traditional assets, and where every process and automation within the organization and with third parties is automated and transparent.
Furthermore, during the next few years, Elpis will build its own blockchain to further increase the efficiency and effectiveness of the platform. A new blockchain will mean a new coin with characteristics specifically built to increase efficiency and effectiveness of our crypto-assets management platform. A new coin will also mean that new functions will be possible, allowing Elpis ecosystem to be fully distributed. During the 3rd year, in fact, we will open the possibility for traders or data scientist to develop trading models that will be tested and used in our trading system. If proven effective, the collaborators will receive rewards for their contribution in terms of rewards in tokens, building for the first time a real distributed asset management platform.
Like many blockchain startups, you have turned to an ICO as a way of raising funds for your company. How are you finding the ICO process so far?
We are just at the start of the process with our main sale starting Monday 13th August. However, we have had considerable interest prior to launching the ICO. We have already achieved our soft cap of $1m during pre-sale and have interest from a number of investors. We have built an elite team of advisors, marketers, and developers to support our growth. Our Telegram group grew more than 20x in 2 weeks as we started our marketing initiatives and we have at least two exchanges confirmed for listing immediately after the ICO. We will be hosting events in London, Seoul, and Milan as well as other major cities over the next few months as we spread the word on.
