David Waslen was finance
first, then tech and, in the latter,
he was influenced by his good friend and co-founder of HedgeTrade, Peter
Danihel. David has studied in the States as well as in the UK, taking a number
of economic degrees. His background is venture capital and private equity with extensive experience managing
growing businesses. He holds a BA from Dartmouth College and an MBA from London
Business School.
As a Canadian, he’s travelled extensively and now lives in Singapore.
When asked how he became involved in blockchain and crypto, he points to his
experiences while traveling:
“I was moving from country to country and discovered how hard it was to
open bank accounts and then transfer my money – both into different currencies
and bank accounts. Oftentimes, the transfer would fail and I’d have to do it
again. Plus, there were the fees
associated with it.
“When I discovered Bitcoin, it all made sense,” he says.
His co-founder Peter is a self-taught programmer and experienced options trader. He has a breadth
of experience with app development and building tech companies, including the
sale of several internet businesses.
David first discovered Bitcoin in 2015/2016 and promptly ‘went down the
rabbit hole’. He was blown away by the technology and cryptocurrency. “I knew
the whole world is going to change, I knew that this was going to disrupt
everything. It is still a nascent industry, but it is growing fast.”
David’s experience with traditional personal finance had not always been
positive. When he looked at Bitcoin, he felt it was a no brainer:
“Having a digital currency that is seamless, frictionless and borderless
across the world makes sense. We use our mobiles for everything so why not for
payments? And then I learned about smart contracts and that was equally mind
blowing. I could see how smart contracts would disrupt the financial sector,
the accounting sector, and the legal sector. If you can automatically execute
software without human error, then this has to be an improvement.”
David and Peter initially set up Rublix Development, which is headquartered in Singapore with offices in Canada and Europe. Rublix is a software development company that develops automatic high frequency trading engines. The direction of the company is both B2C and B2B.
In addition to blockchain and cryptocurrency, Rublix is focused on AI
and machine learning.
David confesses to not objecting to having online content curated for
him. “I know the big companies do it such as Facebook, Amazon and Google, but
it makes sense to me. I would prefer, to be honest, to receive content based on
what I am interested in, rather than randomly generated data.”
Using AI and machine learning is also critical to trading. The best
traders, according to David, are those that do not have emotion – which becomes
possible when using AI tools. And this was how the HedgeTrade project was
conceived.
“We were working through the whole AI and trading idea when Peter came
to me. He showed me how his trades were performing – which were doing really well.
He said he might build a website and post these predictions so that people
could follow him if they wished.”
From there, the two founders began to tease out an idea which was to later become HedgeTrade. What if, they said, traders could post their predictions – blueprints they called them in the end – and people could follow them? Sure, the blueprints would be recorded on the blockchain so there’d be no room for cheating or deletion, but how could they make it truly interesting and potentially profitable?
“So we came up with this model where a trader posts their blueprints.
They invest a stake – so they need to take it seriously. Other, less
experienced traders can then choose to follow these traders and, for a small
fee, see their predictions.
“If the trader is right, then they keep the fees. If they are wrong, the
fees are returned to the purchasers. If a user likes the trader, buys the
blueprint, and follows their advice and wins, then everyone is happy. And,
since it is all on the blockchain, people cannot game the system.”
HedgeTrade is built using blockchain technology, so the blueprints made
are immutable. However, despite choosing to develop on Ethereum, David is very
clear that his project is blockchain agnostic.
“I imagine that better, faster, cheaper platforms will emerge, so the
actual name of the blockchain is immaterial. For us, the certainty that trading
predictions on our platform are true is crucial. The same goes for historic
blueprints – they can’t be tampered with.”
HedgeTrade is already proving popular in its beta version. There are
over 500 traders on the platform with hundreds of prediction blueprints. The
team has plans to introduce new features to make it more optimal for traders,
including a Leaderboard, a follow feature, and chat rooms.
“2020 is going to be the year
of crypto trading,” predicts David.
