WALL STREET WORKING LIKE AI OPEN SOURCE

Richard Craib wants to transform Wall Street from a cutthroat competition into a harmonious collaboration. He wants to make Wall Street Open Source.

The 29-year-old South African technologist started issuing a new digital currency using his hedge fund: Numerai.
Numerai data scientists aren't traders or quants, and they don't want to be. They are experts in statistics, machine learning and artificial intelligence, working as geneticists, physicists, students and professors.

Inspired by the same tech that underpins bitcoin, his creation joins a growing wave of what people in the world of crypto-finance call "digital tokens," internet-based assets that enable the crowdsourcing of everything from venture capital to computing power.

Craib hopes his particular token can turn Wall Street into a place where everyone's on the same team, a collaboration idea. Basically, Numerai is a hedge fund in which an artificially intelligent system chooses all the trades.

Craib and company believe Numerai can become even more successful if it can align the incentives of everyone involved. They hope its new kind of currency, Numeraire, will turn its online competition into a collaboration—and turn Wall Street on its head in the process.

Numerai has distributed Numeraire—1,000,000 tokens in all—to 12,000 participating scientists. The higher the scientists sit on the board, the more Numeraire they receive.

Craib's goals are bigger than just building a hedge fund with crowdsourced Artificial Intelligence. He wants to change the very nature of Wall Street. Competition has made a lot of people wealthy. Maybe collaboration could enrich many more.