Ali Raheman, founder of Autonio, on building an algorithmic trading community

I inherited a passion for science, medicine, invention, and product designing. This made me start my entrepreneurship journey quite early. 

I already have a few successful ventures under my belt, but also many failures that gave me invaluable experience.

I’m a medical graduate but had my first technology patent at 17. Having bootstrapped my businesses, I worked in practically every role and department within an organization gaining experience and understanding.

I started my crypto journey in 2014 as a p2p borrower/lender and trader. When I grasped the potential impact blockchain could have on the very fabric of society, of how we transact, interact, govern, I was hooked. Since then along with my mentors and peers, I’ve been working on different solutions and use-cases for blockchain. Over the years our team has had the pleasure of developing different decentralized solutions for businesses including public companies.  

Autonio is an early-stage decentralized autonomous organization built around developing accessible and easy-to-use trading tools and infrastructure for the DeFi space as a whole. We try to achieve this by democratizing access to trading tools, that, until now, weren’t easily accessible for traders.  

The NIOX Suite is the foundational toolset that includes several products like NIOX Maker, Swarm, Smartdex, and AI. The toolset we’re building in many ways can be compared to a Linux inspired open-source plug-n-play techstack for businesses, developers ultimately optimized for the end-user i.e. traders, investors.

For example, NIOX Maker and NIOX Swarm – an automated trading terminal and liquidity mining protocol enable efficient crowdsourcing of liquidity. Users can deploy market-making bots across integrated exchanges. As part of our partnership with SingularityNET, we’re actively working on AI deployment which aims to enhance trading performances for our users, leading to intelligent and sustainable crowdsourced liquidity.

Finally, Smartdex is a multi-chain DEX featuring an order book interface powered by 0x protocol along with an on-chain market maker. Early iterations are inspired by Uniswap’s AMM model, however, we’re introducing our own on-chain market-making product called the Intelligent Market Maker or the IMM. The DEX is currently live on Polygon (Matic) and will have support for Conflux, BSC, and Cardano.

The NIOX token, as the lifeblood of the NIOX ecosystem, is used to gain access to the trading toolset on a Hold to Use basis, providing easy opt-in/opt-out and a personalized learning curve, with minimal financial implications. 

It serves as a governance token, enabling DAO members to participate in the decision-making process to further develop the project while receiving staking rewards for taking part in the governance. DAO members also benefit from zero trading fees on the Smartdex.

Honestly, being an inconsistent and often erratic trader is what prompted us to build an automated trading platform for ourselves. But in the process of building this solution along with philosophical influences of the idea and power of decentralization, the promise of financial freedom, our vision of Autonio was born.

Our vision is to build a prosperous community around algorithmic trading and we intend to do that by democratizing access to intelligent trading tools and infrastructure. Our goal is to enable users to navigate the crypto space with profitability, privacy, and ease, while our technology also serves other ecosystem participants like exchanges, token projects, and businesses. 

AI and Machine Learning are an important component of our solution. Traditionally AI tools have been inaccessible to the general public, and with SingularityNET’s decentralized AI infrastructure we’re breaking that barrier to entry, enabling all users to utilize the power and opportunity that comes with AI.

We’re developing an infrastructure that will serve as a building block for businesses and developers to train and deploy AI agents and services focused on enhancing automated trading performance. 

Traders will have the ability to integrate different AI agents and portfolio management strategies to enhance their trading performance.

Our advantage may be that it is quite easy to run our tools and participate in our ecosystem. That way we are democratizing access to intelligent trading tools and connecting liquidity buyers and sellers enables sustainable crowdsourced liquidity.

The good thing about all this is, that token projects and exchanges benefit from crowdsourced liquidity while our users have incentives to provide liquidity creating a virtuous cycle, enabling us to be collaborative driving value for the ecosystem. 

Let’s first look at liquidity, market making, and its significance. Liquidity is one of the most important requirements for all financial assets and trading venues. Market participants are unclear as to what drives liquidity and how to measure its effects because market making, the business of providing liquidity, has traditionally been accessible to only a limited number of participants. Hummingbot published a paper that said crypto exchanges and token issuers spend an estimated 1.2 billion dollars every year compensating market makers, like quantitative hedge funds that specialize in crypto assets, in the form of rebates, fees, and the opportunity cost of inventory.

Liquidity has long been a central concern, not only for cryptocurrency and blockchain projects but for financial markets in general. It is a prerequisite for the growth of a project, financially and otherwise. Efforts have been made to solve the liquidity problem by providing it from some concentrated or centralized venue. But this conflicts with the decentralization ethos itself of the DeFi economy.

A marketplace-driven approach to market making can promote consistent crowdsourced liquidity provisions. With the right incentive structure and protocol to enable seamless matching between liquidity buyers (exchanges, tokens) and liquidity sellers (the crowd) we can effectively crowdsource liquidity. NIOX Swarm; our liquidity mining protocol and NIOX Maker – Automated trading tool are designed to enable crowdsourced liquidity. 

When liquidity is truly crowdsourced from a diverse audience whose behavior and interests are uncorrelated, liquidity is fundamentally more robust. It is less likely to evaporate in a crisis and more indicative of a healthy market.

This space transforms more and more towards wider adoption. Crypto as an asset class seems to be maturing, without losing its DNA. And more and more use cases will be found, besides the pure financial and governance aspects. And seeing the rapid pace the whole crypto sphere is moving a lot of exciting stuff can be expected pretty soon.

This hype and re-found interest in DeFi and crypto might slow down, but innovative solutions and teams will prevail.

We see a lot of tribalism in this space. Lots of communities fight with each other about what the best protocol or chain is. But it is getting more and more irrelevant since we already see a rise of cross-chain solutions, where applications facilitate certain aspects of certain protocols, while ideally, the end-user will not even take notice.