Article reprinted from: Zen
Original author: Zen, PANews
Quantrend Technology is a company specializing in AI cryptocurrency quantitative trading, established in 2020. It only took about three years to take the top three positions in the global contract trading volume of Bitcoin and Ethereum, and account for 10% of the Binance Global Contract trading volume. Its high-frequency trading system has a yearly trading volume of US$300 billion. Although none of the three founders has a background in the traditional financial industry, through their hard work and hard work, they finally brought Quantrend to the world-class stage.
Different paths to the same destination: Quantrend’s story of forming the core “Iron Triangle”
Chen Taiyuan, the founder of Quantrend, is known as a "genius" on the Internet in Taiwan. He skipped grades and started a business while still in school. He founded his first company at the age of 19 and obtained a master's degree from the Institute of Telecommunication Engineering at National Taiwan University at the age of 22. Bachelor of Science. As a serial entrepreneur, Chen Taiyuan has developed dating apps such as Lianlian Xiaozhan and If You Are the One. In 2015, he co-founded 17 Live with "Maji Big Brother" Huang Licheng, which became popular. The live broadcast app has grown rapidly after its launch, with tens of millions of downloads in just 8 months.
However, just as 17 Live was at its peak, Chen Taiyuan chose to leave in 2016 and began to devote all his energy to the blockchain and cryptocurrency industry. In August of the following year, Chen Taiyuan co-founded Cobinhood, the world's first zero-handling crypto exchange, and set a new record for Taiwan's ICO at the time. In addition, they also launched Taiwan's first self-developed high-speed underlying public chain platform DEXON in 2019, which can reach 12,000 transmissions per second (TPS).
Shortly after DEXON was launched, the company's top management split due to differences in ideas and management rights. Chen Taiyuan was caught in the storm, and only Xu Jingteng was willing to stand by him, help him sort out the situation and share the troubles. Xu Jingteng is the core figure of the American anti-aging direct sales brand NU SKIN. Because Chen Taiyuan briefly joined the brand in college, the two met and formed a long-term friendship. At that time, the two had no business dealings, and Jingteng, as a "super salesman", did not know much about cryptocurrency.
After completing the relevant aftermath work and finally getting through the darkest moment of the Cobinhood incident, Chen Taiyuan approached Xu Jingteng and invited him to serve as the co-founder of Quantrend. “This (Quantrend) is a really good project that can help customers grow their assets, help exchanges provide deep liquidity, and help the industry become stable in all aspects. It is not just about speculating on coins and projects. It’s just a matter of popularity.” Xu Jingteng said that out of conceptual agreement, he eventually joined Quantrend and served as general manager. Leveraging his rich business experience, Jingteng provides support for the company's business development, organizational management and other tasks.
But if they want to create world-class products, it is not enough for Chen Taiyuan to be responsible for the technical aspects alone. They also need an expert who can be recognized by him and can discuss technical issues together. Finally, they found Dai Zhiyang, the most famous online forum in Taiwan. Co-founder of PTT. Dai Zhiyang has been exploring the front-end of the technology industry since he was in college when Taiwan was just starting to have the Internet. Therefore, after initially founding an online forum, he also participated in the music streaming platform KKBOX and e-commerce electronic payment and other fields.
Dai Zhiyang started mining in 2012 and became exposed to cryptocurrency and blockchain. He believes that blockchain is the next decisive revolution of the Internet, which will completely subvert the entire world, and may even overthrow the so-called country, and even future business. Since 2018 and 19, he has been promoting the entire blockchain industry and promoting various chains and coins. Around the end of 2020, when he encountered some bottlenecks, Chen Taiyuan found him. After a week of brief contact and communication, he decided to invest in this field and served as chief technology officer at Quantrend. Dai Zhiyang said that Xu Jingteng played the most critical role in his decision-making process. The core team of the Iron Triangle was thus formed.
Chen Taiyuan proposed ideas and strategies; Dai Zhiyang was responsible for implementing them with technology; Xu Jingteng focused on company operations and business development. Dai Zhiyang said: "The relationship between the three of us is complementary and smooth."
Twists and turns: from scratch to the world’s top 10 high-frequency traders
Similar to traditional financial market makers, the operation model of crypto market makers is mainly to provide liquidity and market depth to the cryptocurrency market and earn profits in the process. Therefore, people often hear about Jump Trading, Wintermute, etc. Either the institutions are quantitative trading companies involved in stocks, futures, foreign exchange and other businesses on a global scale, or the core personnel come from traditional financial institutions and have strong technical and financial backgrounds. , the crypto market making business is quite familiar to them. Quantrend is completely different. None of its core founders have experience in the financial industry. It must be quite difficult to break out.
Quantrend, which was founded during the COVID-19 pandemic, has made many technical adjustments to its strategy. Quantitative trading requires processing massive amounts of information and data. Chen Taiyuan and Dai Zhiyang's team initially used Python to process it, but soon discovered that its performance was obviously insufficient. After trying Go, it still could not meet the expected standards. In the end, they chose Rust, an unpopular but efficient language. The process of technological transformation sounds simple, but it is actually full of difficulties. Dai Zhiyang, who is responsible for system construction, said: "It may take 1 to 2 years for a general team to change the programming language to write a product. We only need a few months, and we can continue to evolve." The price is that everyone is often locked in a small room for seven or eight hours at a time.
Quantrend is like an APP built on a trading platform, providing value-added services to users such as institutions or VIPs, while also providing liquidity and trading volume to the exchange. Chen Taiyuan said in an interview with PANews, "We are still focusing on maintaining market order and stability, and then developing our AI technology, starting from the root."
In the autumn of 2021, Quantrend completed the architecture of the high-frequency trading system, trained a predictive AI model, and obtained the highest level of VIP from the FTX exchange. After everything is ready, high-frequency trading is officially launched, which should be an important milestone. However, within a few days, the net worth, which had been rising linearly, began to flip and plummet at some point. After re-adjusting the parameters and putting it on the shelves again, it went from straight up to straight down again in just a few hours. Quantrend began to suspect that something was not simple and conducted experiments. The results pointed to the same conclusion: FTX was cheating. A month later, Quantrend finally had to cut his teeth, sell all FTT, remove all strategies, and start over.
In July 2022, it took another half a year before trading resumed on Binance. However, at this time, the crypto market had already entered a cold winter, and all practitioners began to wait for the bull market, but they waited for the collapse of FTX first. Quantrend was able to survive this storm because it transferred its assets early after discovering that FTX was tricky.
After “switching” to the Binance platform, Quantrend has developed steadily for more than a year. From the perspective of Binance's perpetual contracts, Quantrend has basically become one of the top ten traders in the world, and its XAOS trading system generates a trading volume of up to 300 billion US dollars a year. At the beginning of this year, Quantrend also achieved the highest market maker level and VIP level on OKX. It can be said that no matter whether the market conditions are good or bad, its high-frequency trading system has been verified and fully recognized by the market.
As a start-up, Quantrend also provides asset management services, such as the managed sub-account (MSA, Managed Sub-Account) service that Binance VIP 3 and above users can enjoy. The managed sub-account is used by investors when entrusting transactions to a professional trading team. , while maintaining an asset management service architecture that maintains account application flexibility. While enjoying the same preferential VIP rates as the trading team, you can also ensure the safety of your funds. It has flexible operation characteristics, which can not only meet the needs of investors for account differentiation, but also support investors to create multiple custody sub-accounts for use by different trading teams to better adapt to the needs of the diversified asset management market.
Looking to the future: Seeking cooperation with big capital
At present, Quantrend basically has it all in terms of trading volume, strategy, DNS system, and relationships and cooperation with exchanges. Under the expectation of a bull market, a better market also means that a larger amount of funds is needed. As a high-frequency trader ranked near the top ten, Quantrend will seek to cooperate with international capital this year to expand its overall trading volume.
As for its asset management services, Quantrend will further highlight its uniqueness and differentiation in the market, including using custody sub-accounts for value-added services, or seeking cooperation with traditional investment banks. "Through the custody services of these banks, let the banks guarantee the safety of customers' funds, and then provide them with some relatively safe and high-yield products. I think this is what we will do this year."
