Bringing the convenience and expertise of the sound crypto investment strategies, Nazcabot is in the realm of automating the way you trade in the crypto world. We delve into the conversation with NazcaBot team (Evelyn, Alessandro and Valerio)  

Q: NazcaBot is an indeed very interesting name, and probably inspired by Nazca Lines, how do you draw parallels in naming this bot Nazca?

Though we are strongly analytical folks, there are many aspects of life we cannot explain or find a logical reason for. We wanted to seize this underlying concept in our product. We mainly focus on making sense of concrete data and formalizing black-and-white algorithms out of it, yet there is space for intuitions between the “lines”.

Q: Inception to testing of NazcaBot must be a pretty charged up times for you and team, please share this for our young blockchain start-ups readers?

Valerio: We built Nazca because we wanted an easy way to create and backtest long-term strategies, and run them reliably. Before Nazca, I created my own portfolios by hand, wrote code to collect data, analyze it on excel and perform the trades one by one, by hand. For every strategy I’d come up with, I’d need to start over. Nazca is our solution: we can now backtest a new strategy in seconds and execute it with a level of precision impossible to achieve by manually trading on an exchange. We’ve built a few indexes to demonstrate its power.

Alessandro, Evelyn and I have always been a team. We’ve contributed to each other's projects countless times and have that special synergy. We saw the power of Nazca’s idea from the moment we first talked about it. Before writing any code, we planned the developments thoroughly, identified milestones and started developing our MVP. Fastforward to now and we’re working full time on Nazca, which has become much more than an MVP.

Q: When in today’s world where every decision has to be informed and data-driven, automated way of crypto investment is surely the zing thing, how distribution model is crucial in Nazca since this is the first step to use this wizard?

The distribution models, backed by years of academic research, are only the first step of Nazca’s wizard. A distribution model is what dictates how your funds will be divided among the selected cryptocurrencies. What is often more important is the criterion by which you select those cryptocurrencies, for example, you can decide to only pick the top 10 cryptocurrencies by market cap, which will change from time to time as new coins make the coinmarketcap top 10—we call these dynamic asset selections. This is where the curated coin data comes into play.

Making data-driven decisions is key, especially when your money is at stake. Not all data is born the same though, one of the major challenges when investing in Cryptocurrencies is collecting all the data points from multiple sources and bringing it together into one—I’m talking prices, volumes, trends, links to white papers, developer activity, sentiment. One of Nazca’s gems is a comprehensive database of curated data for each coin, with a summary of its use case, important links and of course quantitative data. It’s what I wish I had when I bought my first altcoin.

Q: Which are the key differentiators of Nazca as compared to other bots in this investment space?

Contrary to what you might think, we only learned about our competitors along the way; when we started working on Nazca none of them were public yet, and as the niche gets more crowded, we want our product to hold close to our vision and key features: our powerful backtesting engine, secure environment, and usability. Our main goal is to close the gap between advanced investment practices and crypto-enthusiasts, giving them the chance to make responsible crypto investment choices even without a financial background. Expert investors will soon also have their dedicated spot and set of tools within Nazca.

Q: Currently, are you roping in any investment experts/panel to strategize the investment model or its completely mathematics/algorithm driven?

The investment models are based on traditional strategies, which users can customize as they wish. We encourage users to think of Nazca as an unopinionated tool that empowers data-driven experimentation. Ultimately the customization options can allow for countless strategies—this is where the “Shamans” can really shine. The Shaman program, which is launching soon, will create opportunities for experienced investors (who are vetted and approved) to share their strategies with the rest of the Nazca community.

Q: Tells us about the lateral plans featured around the Nazca in general as part of your company growth and discuss your business model how it is profitable for you as a company and per se for the customers, any success story in beta testing to be shared.

We’ve received a ton of positive feedback regarding the backtesting tool, so one of our main objectives is to continue iterating and improving on that. Some exciting features users can expect in the near future include more powerful diversification algorithms, even more, coin data, and a massive list of curated strategies.

Our subscription model ensures that our success is directly tied to our users’. The monthly fee can be paid in an array of different cryptocurrencies (of course!) and is manually renewed every month. This ensures that all of our users are active and invested in the project. We’re planning to reward our most active users for sharing their strategies, and to create a totally open community around Nazca.

Q: With Nazca, how you ensure the risk-free experience for your user base, as a bot will be rebalancing your portfolio automatically with trade APIs?

Security is paramount for us, and we are committed to maintaining the highest standards. All sensitive data is encrypted and servers adhere to security best practices. Nazca doesn’t require Withdrawal permissions on users’ API keys, which limits the potential attack surface. For the very paranoid, it is also possible to enable Trade Access on the API keys only during a rebalance period and keep them at rest in between.

Q. What are the challenges you foresee in growing your Nazca subscriber and roadmap ahead?

Seems obvious, but launching a product in the crypto universe is quite challenging. We haven’t received any third party funding or sponsorship, nor held any ICOs, so all the development and current marketing efforts have been and are funded by us directly. The roadmap ahead is an infinite-scrolling-tab on our internal Trello board, but somehow we still manage to burn cards like cigarettes! Tweaks and optimizations are being rolled daily in the background as we receive feedback while focusing on major, upcoming features.

Our aim is to bridge the curious and first-timers with expert investors, by creating a safe platform where seasoned traders and investors can offer their guidance and be rewarded for that. We are very excited about this and are already receiving applications for what we called the “Shaman” program. We just can’t wait to see what our users will come up with.

Our next updates will feature more investment models, pre-made portfolios inspired by famous index funds, new filters for custom strategies, strategies sharing, backtests comparison, and a lot more (for real!).

We really enjoyed conversing with the Nazcabot team and wish them all the very best. Hope our readers get the gist of sound crypto investing with Nazcabot and keep HODLing on the real crypto-dimes.