Aluna.Social: Q&A
Alvin Lee — Co-founder
1. What is Aluna.Social?
Aluna.Social is a Multi-exchange Social Trading Terminal for cryptocurrency traders and investors. It is a place where traders can share information with anyone all over the world, to help each other make better gains on the platform, and where investors can automatically copy those traders.
User can connect multiple exchange accounts on our platform using their API KEYs and manage all of their accounts in one place (we are not an exchange ourselves).
Each user has a public profile with their real-time trading data and history, so users can check the performance of other traders and learn from them, hopefully improving their own trading strategy. This creates a transparent environment that invites constant scrutiny from participants, generates a positive social feedback loop, and improves the community’s trading performance.
Everything is presented in a clean and consistent interface to execute trades across all the top exchanges, monitor the market prices, charts and sentiment of other traders.
2. What is the motivation behind Aluna.Social?
Aluna.Social a cumulation of our experience as cryptocurrency traders.
We started this project because we wanted to solve the 3 major problems that we ourselves faced on our journey as crypto traders:
1. Lack of trust and transparency in the industry
- Hard to verify someone’s trading record to see if they’re actually good
- Hard to keep in touch with trusted people and be notified about their trades
2. Highly fragmented market of crypto trading services
- Many exchanges to login
- Different interfaces across exchanges
- Too many social channels to watch
- Hardly any connection between social networks and real trading data, for instance ‘how do I check if someone on twitter is actually a good trader?‘’
- Different websites for signals that can’t put the trades automatically on your accounts
3. Overwhelming information and noise
- On Aluna you can simply follow people who you like and have verified their performance
Overall we are creating a platform that will save traders time and give them the tools to become consistently profitable.
3. Why gamify crypto-trading?
Gamification adds an element of fun to the trading platform and gives users an added incentive to interact with the platform in order to rank up, earn badges, gain reputation. Moreover, this allows us to reach out to a larger audience by tapping into the huge gaming market that is currently underserved by crypto trading platforms.
Currently we’re still developing the gamified part of our platform which includes features such as a leader board, a badge and reputation system, as well as features that rely on the token we’re developing. The token will allow us to reward users, give them discounts for subscriptions and allow them to play games against each other.
These games will mostly happen around predicting the market and the outcomes of trades. This will enable users to “vote” with their tokens on things such as “which portfolio distribution” will perform better, which trader will do well on our leader board, if a specific trade by a user will be profitable, if the daily bitcoin candle will close green, among other fun things we have in our bag of ideas.
Gamification is very important to the platform for many reasons, the most important of which are: sentiment data and user engagement. Through the games we will be able to provide data such as how the community feels about a certain outcome on the market, while keeping users engaged and coming back to the platform to hangout and discuss ideas with their peers.
4. What are the incentives for experienced traders and noob traders to signup on Aluna.Social?
If you’re a more experienced trader,
- Our trade execution engine enables you to add the API keys of your favorite exchanges and manage all your accounts from one place
- You can build up your reputation, and get recognized for your trading achievements
- Earn extra income as you earn rewards for sharing profitable trades and climbing the leader board, and winning our monthly trading competitions
If you’re new to trading,
- Aluna can send you notifications when your favorite traders buy or sell
- Aluna enables you to view the performance and real-time trading data and history of other traders, therefore you can learn from their trades and insights and potentially choose to automatically copy trades
The transparent nature of a social trading platform can help everyone become better traders, having your trades displayed publicly potentially helps you to reduce behavioral biases such as the disposition effect
5. Why is Aluna.Social unique?
Aluna takes social trading platforms, popularised by eToro since 2007, and re-invents the experience fit for a post-Bitcoin era.
There are 3 things that make Aluna unique. We are:
1. Not an exchange or broker
- We are a trading terminal that provides non-custodial services
- We can add more exchanges as they become more relevant while keeping the same smooth user experience
2. Not just a trading terminal
- We are also a social network for traders & investors
3. Aluna is Crypto Native
- Built from the ground up with the latest technology to integrate seamlessly with crypto markets and services
- Novel token integrations that re-think incentive mechanisms
- Our reward mechanisms and gamified platform constantly incentivise users to share good trades and invite new users to join the platform
6. Who is behind Aluna.Social? Backgrounds?
Aluna.Social is co-founded by Alvin and Henrique.
Alvin has been trading cryptocurrencies since 2013 and is a well known in the trading community. With a BBA from the National University of Singapore and MA in Digital Media Communications, he leverages years of engagement with crypto enthusiasts to deliver a product made by crypto traders, for crypto traders.
Henrique is an algorithmic trader actively involved in the cryptocurrency markets since 2014. Programming since dial-up and having worked with a myriad of technical teams, his experience enables him to gel together a diverse team of talents to deliver our unique experience.
The rest of the team is made up of our CTO — Anderson, full-stack developer — Filipe, front-end engineer — Bernardo, and product designer — Alex.
7. Who are Aluna.Social closest competitors, how different are they?
Coinigy, best known for its charting features, also offers a multi-exchange Trading Terminal that enables users to connect and manage multiple exchange accounts from one single platform. Their business model also runs on monthly subscription fees, similar to Aluna. There are a couple things that set us apart from Coinigy:
1. Our focus on providing a social network and useful data from our community
2. Our focus on creating a user-friendly user experience that is inspired by games and multimedia platforms as opposed to financial applications
As one of the leading social and copy trading platforms, eToro has inspired Aluna in many ways. The two main differences between eToro and Aluna is that eToro is an exchange/broker while Aluna is not, and eToro is a platform built predominantly around the legacy financial markets while Aluna is a crypto native.
8. What is/will be Aluna.Social’s marketing plan?
A big part of our marketing strategy is product-led. By providing freemium access to the platform, users get to try out the product right from the first interaction with our platform. This way users are able to gain value from the platform features and the community, before having to commit further in order to enjoy the advanced features such as copy trading.
Our token also acts as an intrinsic incentive for users to be active on the platform, and to attract new users to the platform with in-built reward mechanisms.
This is supplemented by a marketing strategy aimed at attracting our target audience via a variety of online channels, and involves content creation, distribution, amplification, and PR. In conjunction, another important aspect is to keep the community informed, entertained, and engaged on social media like our Twitter and Telegram channels.
We also planning tournaments that will award the best (and worst) performing users on our leader board therefore creating an incentive for users to share their data even if they don’t plan to copy trades.
9. What are your challenges ahead?
Since our public Beta recently went live, our most immediate challenge is user acquisition. We’re starting to conduct some small-scale marketing campaigns now, and are planning for a bigger PR campaign in the next quarter.
Another challenge would be forging the right partnerships with key players in the cryptocurrency trading and market analysis space who can help us to improve our market reach.
10. What will the roadmap look like after 2019?
We look forward to improving our web3 integrations, introducing a badge system with token rewards, and other gaming features for predictions.
Furthermore, to commemorate our public launch in 2020, we’ll be hosting weekly and monthly Trading Competitions, with prizes to be paid out from a Rewards Pool.
Stay tuned and follow us on Twitter and join our Telegram Group to keep up to date with our progress.
For more information about Aluna.Social, please visit our:
Token website: https://token.aluna.social
Blog: https://blog.aluna.social
Social network and Trading platform: https://aluna.social
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