Robin Janaway and David Fabiyi join us for a Hackernoon AMA about their new startup Trade Fighter, a crypto-asset price prediction platform. Trade Fighter is built on BSC and launching on Pancakeswap with NFT’s following a month after by a world-renowned manga artist.
Always DYOR when it comes to crypto investing, and don't take anything here as a recommendation or encouragement from Hackernoon to invest in or use Trade Fighter. This interview is for information and ente
This Slogging thread by Akasha Rose, Robin Janaway, Limarc Ambalina, David Fabiyi, Justin Roberti occurred in slogging's official #amas channel, and has been edited for readability.
Hackers, get ready to place your bets. Do you think ETH and BTC are going up, or down?
David Fabiyi is based out of Dubai and is a London-based Emerging Markets expert with over 7+ years of experience working in Africa. Robin Janaway spent 5 years living in Abuja, Nigeria heading up a prominent family office.
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Hey Robin and Davi keen to hear your ideas about why you believe the idea of betting on the rise or fall of crypto is appealing. Who is your customer, and what problem are you solving for them? What are the advantages of better on crypto as opposed to just buying it and hodling or staking?
Morning Akasha Rose trading has always been the privilege of a few, our aim at Trade Fighter is to follow the likes of Robinhood to further democratise the trading space whilst allowing new investors/entrants into the crypto space to test out (and improve) their trading skills with low barriers to entry and low managed risk. I think when you combine prediction with gamification you have a product that appeals to a younger age group (18+). In terms of what we are solving - it is more about access, we plan on having many assets the user can predict on - not to mention further games to be added to the platform, so we are providing a $1 entry point and an opportunity to improve the user's skills through research/analysis and to try their skill on the platform. Buying crypto can be expensive it ties up capital and not everyone has the financial capacity to be able to stake it meaningfully in the case of DeFi products, so this is all about ease of entry and if you are skilled you can make returns quickly and easily.
If I can add to this and expand from Robinhood - the point of ‘age’ is really interesting and I think that we are seeing with the NFT world that it has opened up a whole new age group to the traditional art world - the reason Sotheby’s and Christie’s have moved quickly into this space (when in reality the providence of the blockchain means centralised structures such as them should be irrelevant ..) is that this is giving them access to a young/ wealthy / tech market that they have been trying to reach forever - case and point the average age of the Beeple auction.
A little intro from us .......
Hello everyone, it is our great pleasure to introduce Trade Fighter to everyone, and both David and I as the founders. David and I have known each other since university days (Oxford Brookes) and despite different career paths have always shared a mutual love for all things tech, TF is not our first rodeo and we have created two applications previously as well as researching numerous other ideas - TF is the culmination of a long-standing love for the crypto space and the ideology behind it and many nights spent thinking about what could work and why we believe it to be so!
Hi Robin! Thanks for joining us. So here’s the question all NFT, DeFi, and new Crypto projects have to inevitably answer… How can new investors, potential users, and the general public know that this isn’t another get rich quick scheme or one of the endless scams that have plagued the crypto space?
I'm curious if you've seen the project Candle Bets, whose value proposition is skills-based betting in a casino environment using technical analysis. What sort of draw and benefits does betting on whether coins will go up or down offer over something like that?
Let me see if I can say a few words on this - the word "skill" and "betting" in the same sentence is an interesting one - if you are skilled at something, it will tend to mean you have practised that thing so much that the high probability of you being right can be deemed as often - now - if you are betting - yes you have skills but you still have no idea what the outcome is going to be - take a hedge fund who have quants and dedicated algo teams - they make a bet every day on the market and they will tell you with all their skills - "you can never predict the market".
Betting in the casino has never been for me because I just don't understand the fundamentals - but I will choose to bet on coins because I get the fundamentals and have more of a chance of getting it right because of real physical factors that drives the price points
Plus - Trade Fighter is a crypto asset price PREDICTION platform - not a betting stage - let's try and eradicate the word betting out of all the discussions.
Limarc Ambalina your point is a good one, this is not a ‘meme coin’ we have a platform we will be launching at the same time we launch the token - not just plans... this is reality, we are looking to create a business here, our minds are on the metaverse and long term where gaming meets crypto meets the metaverse. It is not on doing some dog-themed coin rug pull. We want to really develop and make a great project and product - this is why we are aligned with a top Japanese based manga artist for our NFT drop - we are looking long term reputation, not short term.
Hey, that's cool! since you have spent some time working with African markets, do you want to tell us a little bit about that and what you were doing there? What role do African markets play in the future of tech and crypto?
Hi Akasha Rose so I was involved in Africa for over 10 years, I started off doing some advisory there for mining (AIM listed / TSX Toronto listed gold mining companies in several countries, this was London based and led me to work in family offices (including Somercourt - which was the family office of the hedge fund Sloane Robinson) I was an analyst there and ended up focusing on their private Africa investments (ie not publicly traded companies), from there I was headhunted by a large Nigerian family to set up their family office in Abuja where I ran it for 5 years, I was in charge of investment strategy and worked on several projects including a food retail franchise. Ironically the first paper I did for the family when I was there was on Bitcoin !!! Africa and Nigeria especially had seen huge interest in fintech (Flutterwave, Paga, Interswitch among other success stories) but there is a huge gap between the existing infrastructure of government, legislation and banking (which is highly risk-averse and is extremely difficult for entrepreneurs to borrow from - and if so it’s usually at prohibitive rates) and the reality of what’s on the ground - fintech was meant to solve the underbanked/unbanked and cross border payments - to be frank, it has not. Combine this with the decline of the Naira (Nigeria’s currency) and you have the perfect storm for crypto and that is why Nigerians has flooded to BTC and other coins - easy cross bordering / not having to deal with the bureaucracy and everyday banking issues (no cash in cash machines/problems with SWIFT transfers / high fees etc) and with USDT or other stable coins a much safer asset to hold their money in that Naira. Nigeria has 32% of the country using crypto and it's officially banned - crypto is freedom, crypto is independence and for them its security. So its role is vital it is just a problem for the country as they have no control over it and thus the ability to move funds out of the country will inevitably be an issue for them. But crypto has been mass adopted and will only increase, despite government crackdowns it is still better than any government or private sector solution - so it is up to the countries to adopt it and accept it and use it to improve and drive forward their economies and private sector.
Firstly let's start with the statistics - Statista conducted a survey and found that 32% of Nigerians trade in crypto. In Feb this year, the Government banned the banks from dealing with exchanges - one might have thought this would have a negative effect, right? Well, no, the opposite happened because Nigerian in the month of July alone traded just under $40M (USD) peer-to-peer which is up from last month figure of $36M (USD). The instability of the national currency with the compounding effect of devaluation has made more people use BTC to pay their foreign manufacturers and vice versa. There is no better use-case for crypto than the developing world but this is threatened by the negative sentiments deriving from the west which in turn is making countries that need it the most - actually make decisions that could be detrimental to the future economy - this perhaps allows one to draw the conclusion that regarding Africa's role in both tech and crypto especially, the future is bleak unless the top tier countries start to lay positive examples that will also encourage African leaders to make laws that will both strengthen and prolong the future of crypto.
Thanks for the info so far guys. I think I get the basic concept of Trade Fighter. One thing I don’t get is where the money comes from. Let’s say a user makes a correct prediction, they get paid for predicting correctly. Who pays them and where does the money come from to pay them?
Trade fighter is actually a peer to peer platform - users choose if they want to enter a bull (price go up) or bear (price go down) contract - user decide the amount they want to pledge in BNB, minimum pledge is $1usd and Max is $200 - user chooses the contract time duration they want e.g. 30sec - the platform based on that information matches a bull contract with a bear contract and the user with the correct prediction gains the other user's funds (funds are paid out in TDF tokens) - and if the platform cannot match users - user will be up against the Trade Fighter Bot and if their prediction is correct - platform pays them out in TDF tokens and if wrong they lose their pledged funds.
The Nigerian crypto community has proved itself to be amazingly resilient quincybdk . Of the recent job adverts I've hired for, more than 50% of applicants have been from Nigeria, and the same goes for any Ambassador programs I have run. There are also strong community adoption initiatives led by organizations like Blockchain Africa and the African Blockchain Centre. Given the attacks on crypto freedom in Nigeria, the resilience and belief in crypto truly astound me. I really expect great things to come out of the region in the next decade, simply because there is such a large proportion of the community becoming crypto native, even despite political pressure to the contrary.
Akasha Rose absolutely there is certainly a shift from the young and what that represents including new political ideals etc - if leadership can be aligned then great things will happen.
One other point I would like to raise is that we see Trade Fighter as a company that can grow within the gamified blockchain space and as the reality of the metaverse becomes clearer we see gaming, crypto and an ability to play games with friends as something massive, it is certainly something we are keeping an open mind towards as we grow the business post-DEX listing. From a personal POV I have been excited by the idea of the metaverse ever since I read Snow Crash (for the first time!! several years ago
What's on the roadmap for Trade Fighter and where do you see your massive as being 5 or ten years from now?
Hi Akasha Rose the roadmap is super exciting - we are already building our next price prediction game, for the Trade Fighter platform, this will be super fun and will allow several friends to play against each other at once, next we have the NFT launch - this is something we have put so much energy in and we have partnered with a renowned Japanese manga artist who is creating this amazing NFT’s for us, I can’t say too much about this now as we are involved in a few discussions about this project but it is going to be huge, they are amazing illustrations but also will have in site utility functions.... next we are looking at building games in line with the community, what do they want to see etc and how do we maximise our relationship with the community to bring to life the sort of prediction based games they want. In 5 years TDF is established as a market leader in the gamified crypto prediction space - creating a new breed of traders - the ‘gamer traders’ who enjoy gaming, crypto brought them to trading and they represent the use case that would make us and our continually developing ecosystem an interesting fit for key partnerships come through metaverse. 10 years from now sounds like a prediction that even Trade Fighter wouldn’t make ! We want to continue to adapt to the changing crypto space and keep pushing forward the ecosystem taking into account (and adapting to) any changing legislation along the way 🚀
Hey, I hope so too! Can you tell us more about this new breed of game traders? What makes them different to the degen/OG crypto traders?
Morning - I think we have seen through Robinhood that there is a wave of people who had never been into trading before, whether this was caused by the pandemic or from the creation of a platform (in RH) that was intuitive, gamified and less intimidating than traditional platforms (for example IG index etc) - with an average age of 31 this new Reddit reading trader was all of a sudden interested in the world which they had felt cut out from - either by access or high barriers of entry. Now there are pros and cons to this obviously - the con being do the users know what they are doing/have they done their research etc - well this is why we see ourselves as the training pool, the place where you can swim but still touch the floor - we believe that our community will actually learn the market through playing our game and with the ability to play small amounts it gives you a chance to learn without exposing yourself to moonshot losses. The pros of this RH / pandemic enabled trading world is the democratisation of the space - no longer just for those with an economics or finance degree, or with certain amounts of capital, brokers etc - it’s for everyone - exactly as it should be - and this ties in nicely with the ideology of crypto, it is a decentralised community, with access for the masses, those who want to learn - where people can be staking and earning more than any bank can give them anywhere etc - the new finance sector is being born, we are happy to be a part of that community.
The democratization of finance is a huge theme of 2021 in the space for sure.
Absolutely
I think I'm late to the party here, but how does your platform compare to other copytrade sites? Does gamifying crypto investing -- investing in notoriously volatile assets -- encourage reckless behavior from retail investors? where is the ethical line on education vs. gamification?
Good morning Justin Roberti thanks for sharing, actually this is something we have been very careful with - we have limited our predictions to a maximum of $20 and believe that we allow a safe environment for newbies that want to test and develop their skills with limited risk, they can, after all, use the training section of our platform without actually using real money. It is our belief that we can help retail investors improve their skills and learn more about the market - this is a much more realistic way of community engagement as decentralisation and democratisation of the financial sector gains pace.
Do you have any how-to content to offer new users?
Yea we will be launching how-to videos closer to the launch date - thanks
Thanks for being Hackernoon's Slogging AMA guests Robin and David. How can readers follow you and get involved or learn more?
Thank you, Akasha Rose and everyone, I hope we managed to answer your questions and look forward to more interaction post-launch (which is coming up very soon)- to stay involved and up to date with our project you can follow us -
Our website for more information:
🔹 Telegram:
🔹 Twitter:
🔹 Discord:
