Taklimakan Network

Taklimakan Network – is a business platform for cryptocurrency investors, traders, analysts being a connecting resource between beginners and experts. Taklimakan platform is aimed to empower and attract amature investors by providing new tools and great knowledge base. Experienced traders and analysts will be encouraged to share their experience and help newcomers to become more efficient in personal fund management. Some Taklimakan innovations will seem new and exciting even to the gurus of investment world because it aims to interconnect social networks, investments, and blockchain, and create unique and efficient fund management experience for everyone.

Problem

The rapid development of the cryptocurrency market provides unique investment opportunities. It is important for individual investors with limited knowledge in cryptocurrencies to not miss such opportunities and get access to promising projects at their earliest stage of development, when conditions for entering such projects are the most favorable. The cryptocurrency market is at the very beginning of its formation and is very volatile and risky. Individual investors often lack experience and analysis tools that are normally used to evaluate projects in traditional segments of the financial market. Independent trading and independent asset management without the experience and knowledge of the market often lead to a loss of invested capital.

Additional risks create high volatility in the market and serious systematic problems have already become noticeable:

3.1 Problems associated with independent trading

- The young, not yet established market of cryptocurrency is not always amenable to technical analysis. Sometimes even a professional trader with an experience cannot determine the medium-term direction and not even the short-term trajectory

- Financial education, as well as practice in trading are prerequisite and necessary for professional trading in with cryptocurrencies. It is required to understand and capture the favorable and unfavorable situation on the market before entering into directional trade.

- With the inflow of a large number of people interested in cryptocurrency, a lot of low-quality and fraudulent services appeared in the market offering trading signals, participation in pumps and dumps and in the asset management. As a rule, mostly do not provide stability and sometimes even lead to the loss of funds.

- Technical features and inferiority of young and still developing cryptocurrency exchanges, cause certain inconveniences in the trading.

Exchange transactions and speculation on the exchange cryptocurrencies are identical to any other. To make a profit you have to buy at the low price and sell at the higher price. That is just like when you invest in an ordinary currency. The base of instruments and the principle of determining the goals for trade are set in the same way as in the fixed income, stocks or FOREX markets. But even the certain knowledge of the basics of trading in the financial markets, does not guarantee the profit from trading in cryptocurrencies.

3.2 Challenges of individual investing

- There is a tendency in the market when many projects experience difficulties with the development of products announced during ICO, and in the future the situation will only worsen.

- Due to absence of high-quality analytics and presence of constant information noise created around projects that go to the ICO, a non-professional investor is losing focus and the opportunity to distinguish high-quality projects from those that have elements of significant fraud (also called scam).

- With the growth of the number of ICOs, potential high-yield "unicorn" projects become indistinguishable from scam in the flow of information noise and do not attract sufficient attention from independent investors.

- The ICO market has relatively low barriers to entry, which leads to a rapid growth of bubbles and attracts scammers seeking easy money.

- At the current stage of development there are no clear criteria and guidelines for choosing projects for individual investing in the ICO market. The only document describing the project that goes to the ICO is the whitepaper, in which one can often see a description of the idea or concept of a future product and the whitepaper rarely provides a justification for the return of investments. Therefore, it is not always possible to build a clear methodology for evaluating projects.

- No less significant problem is that investors have to collect information about projects in parts from various sources: company websites, discussions on forums and in social networks where there is a high probability of encountering unverified information and rumors, which create additional problems for individual investing in ICOs.

During periods of high volatility in the cryptocurrency market, inaccurate construction of the portfolio and failure to follow risk management principles would immediately lead to a decrease in portfolio value and significant financial losses. In situations when there are no fundamental reasons for companies to grow and technical analysis does not work, it is necessary to analyses projects using other tools that are often not available to individual investors. Such tools are at the disposal of specialized business sites specializing in investing in crypto assets and one of them is the Taklimakan Network.

4. Taklimakan Network Solution
Introduction

Taklimakan platform is aimed to empower and attract amature investors by providing new tools and great knowledge base. Experienced traders and analysts will be encouraged to share their experience and help newcomers to become more efficient in personal fund management.
Some Taklimakan innovations will seem new and exciting even to the gurus of investment world because it aims to interconnect social networks, investments, and blockchain, and create unique and efficient fund management experience for everyone.
Platform components

Platform shall consist of the following components:
1. Analytics
2. Trading signals and strategies
3. Asset and fund management
4. Internal payment system
5. Educational Materials
6. Crowd Predictions
7. General functionality

4.1 Analytics
Platform will support Analyst as a type of user. Analysts will research ICOs or major cryptocurrencies and produce their reports as a product of their research. Platform will have the capability to publish the reports on the platform web site. Reports will allow investors and traders to make their market decisions, so proper legal disclaimers should be included with the reports.
Reports usually describe mid-term to long-terms market effects and aim to predict price changes from one week to several months’ time frame to facilitate low frequency trading. Therefore, platform functionality related to analytical reports will be designed with this time frame in mind.
Analytics section will contain analyst database and allow searching and filtering of analysts by certain attributes such as rating, their investment products / tools. Search result will be displayed as a list of analysts in a table, with filtering and sorting capability.
There will be free and paid reports:
• Whether report is paid or free, will be determined at the time of publishing by analyst. Free report cannot be converted to paid, but paid reports can be converted to free by the report publisher
• Free reports’ goal is to demonstrate analyst’s knowledge and capabilities, so report rating functionality will be implemented for free reports. Report rating will be used to calculate cumulative Analyst rating along with Analyst rating by users
• Investors and traders can search for Analysts with best reports as well as Analysts with best ratings, as well as for analysts with best aggregated rating (that includes both analyst rating and report rating)
• Free reports can contains references to paid reports that will allow to promote paid reports
• Paid reports will allow to create a webinar for subscribers so that investors and traders can talk live with report publisher
• Paid reports will have commenting and rating functionality so that users can discuss/rate the report. This will add value to both report publishes as they will receive feedback, as well as for report consumers as they will receive crowd opinion and be able to discuss
• In case if report consumer needs a private communication with report publisher, “Ask expert” feature will allow users to contact report publisher personally within a pre-configured interval of time either by chat or by voice call
• Because timing after publishing the report is important, scheduling feature will allow to schedule private conversations leaving time gaps for the Analyst for non-private communication as well as scheduling webinars
• Platform will facilitate creation of legal disclaimers for free and paid analytics reports

Subscription feature will facilitate user access to paid reports. In order to read a report that user has a subscription for, user will have to authenticate on the platform web site, navigate to the report and open it. Reports can only be read, copying will not be allowed by the DRM system.
Subscriptions to paid reports will have different subscription levels:
• Single report: The subscriber will have access to one report
• Single analyst: The subscriber will have access to all reports published by one analyst for a limited period of time
• Unlimited: The subscriber will have access to all reports produced by all analysts for a limited period of time
• Single analyst and unlimited subscription plans will allow to pay for the subscription monthly or make a one-time payment for 6-month or 12-month subscription with appropriate volume discount

News section will be displayed on the authenticated user’s home page and will contain most recent changes that include:
• New free reports published by analysts
• New analysts and trading instrument providers who recently joined the platform
• General Platform news and performance
• Analysts will be able to publish announcements of their paid reports in the news section for additional fee
• Traders will be able to publish announcements of their new management offers in the news section for additional fee

4.2 Trading signals and strategies
Trading signals mostly consist of numerical information that is aimed to provide short term market prediction in the time frame less than 1 day, therefore facilitating intraday (high frequency) trading.
Trading signals can be evaluated for quality by several factors:
• Correlation with price. Signal needs to be correlated with price statistically significantly more than 50% of time or statistically significantly less than 50% of time
• A sample strategy may be provided with trading signal. Sharpe ratio can be calculated for sample ratio
Platform will support publishing of trading signals, as well as links to external trading signal APIs.
Along with trading signals, trading instrument providers can publish trading strategies. A trading strategy instructs the investor whether they should make buy or sell decision. Trading strategies can have short term frequency or long term frequency. Even though strategies in modern financial markets include high frequency and ultra-high frequency trading, these require trading automation and are out of scope for Taklimakan platform. Taklimakan trading strategies will facilitate only medium and low frequency trading, i.e. with enter/exit cycle not shorter than 1 hour without any limitations on how long it can be.

Trading strategy include:
• Type, time, and amount of purchase (long, short)
• Exit strategy (time, price, market conditions, etc.)
• Performance indicators such as Sharpe ratio and/or Sortino ratio

Publishing trading signal will include:
• Publishing signal description. Signal provider may describe the method by which this signal is generated
• *Publishing python code for sample strategy
• Manual publishing of values of trading signal (for internal signal publishing)
• Chat feature will be available a certain period of time after signal value is published. Signal consumers will be able to get their questions answered in a timely manner by the signal publisher
• While chat time window is active, another signal value can be published for the same signal
• When chat with a user is initiated, the chat window indicates signal ID/Name and the value discussed
• *Automated publishing of values of trading signal (API will be provided)

Platform will also provide:
• *Automated signal sharpe ratio calculation and signal search filtering by sharpe ratio
• Signal commenting and rating features will allow users to provide feedback about signals and single signal values, as well as signal provides. Rating of signal providers will be an aggregate value of user ratings
• Signal search and filtering by user signal ratio, product, provider ratio, signal quality, and sharpe ratio*

Publishing a trading strategy includes:
• Publishing description of strategy, signals, and algorithms used, as well as cryptocurrencies and assets that are used in the strategy and stock exchanges that strategy is designed for
• Publishing stock exchange descriptions and registration terms and instructions to help users acquire individual accounts on the cryptocurrency stock exchanges needed
• Every decision that investors and traders should make is published. The decision includes enter/exit conditions, specifies which cryptocurrency/asset should be used in transaction and specifies stock exchange(s) where the transaction should be made
• Platform will analyze strategy for Exchanges used and will filter out users who are not allowed to have accounts of these Exchanges due to their citizenship: Such users will not be able to see this strategy in search results or the strategy will be marked as unusable for this user

* Out of MVP scope

4.3 Asset and Fund Management
One of the main goals of the platform is to securely connect traders with investors by allowing traders to manage invested funds. First, traders will be able to customize and publish crypto asset management offer on their personal page.
Customizations include certain offer variations such as:
• Trade Instruments used
• Portfolio (cryptocurrencies and assets traded with proportions)
o Traders may choose to utilize existing Taklimakan portfolios or create their own.
o Traders will be required to invest at least 3% of the portfolio in TLKN tokens
• Exchanges used
• Terms and conditions between trader and investor
o Trader commission
o Deposit and withdrawal rules and limitations
o Vesting periods
o Other terms
• Dates when funds for this offer are accepted from investors
• Dates when trading starts and ends
• Minimum and maximum investment caps
Once trader published their offer or multiple offers, investors will be able to find them on the Asset and Fund Management trader search page. If investors like a trading offer, they may choose to invest. The investment process begins with acceptance of management offer. After the management offer is accepted, it becomes management agreement, and investor needs to transfer funds from investor wallet to the wallet that is controlled by the platform. Funds may be transferred within dates defined in management offer. If maximum cap is reached before the investment end date, the investment stage is closed and no more funds will be accepted. After investment dates close, investment evaluation happens: If minimum cap is not reached, funds are returned to investors with no trader commission charged. Platform though may charge some small operations fees to cover gas and management costs. If minimal cap is reached, trader may begin trading operations at the trading start date. Some terms in management agreement are automatically enforced by the platform. For example “Cash in if portfolio drawback becomes greater than 10%”.
As traders make trading decisions, platform will automatically query information about these decisions from the exchange and publish for the investors. Investors will not see all decisions made by the trader, but only decisions related to the portfolios they are invested in. In order to protect trading secret, trader’s decisions will only be published after they have executed on the market. If a decision is cancelled, it will not be published.
Besides trading decisions, current portfolio performance will be published, which includes:
• For each invested portfolio: Overall portfolio performance starting from the time of user investment, which includes current alpha, beta, and sharpe ratio, as well as historical data for these values (including graphs)
• Investor stake in each portfolio
• Performance of user investment aggregate across all portfolios (alpha, beta, Sharpe ratio current and historical data)
After trading terms are finished, traders should convert all assets / funds into a predefined withdrawal currency common for all investors such as ETH or BTC. If trader does not make a decision within a certain predefined period of time (one to three days), conversion is done by the platform.
The withdrawal amount is calculated using the following formula:
1. User invests X amount of a cryptocurrency in portfolio P
2. At the time when trading starts, investors’ stakes in the portfolio are calculated using current conversion rates
3. At the time of withdrawal, trader’s commission is transferred to trader’s address and platform fees are transferred to platform address
4. The remaining amount is distributed between investors proportionally to their stakes in the beginning of trading so that investors share gains or losses proportionally to their investment in trader’s portfolio
Some trader strategies include simultaneous trading on more than one exchange. In order to trust funds for management under such trading strategy, investor needs to accept management agreement, and transfer funds to multiple exchange wallets according to the agreement.
Before investor can accept agreement, platform will verify that adequate funds are available in investor’s wallet.
Trader will receive payment for their services (trader’s commission) according to the agreement. The payment will be made in predetermined cryptocurrency (ETH, BTC, and such or TKLN).
After trading is finished, Performance Information Report about portfolio managed by this trader will be generated and will affect the search results when investors search for the trader: Better performance in the past will improve trader’s chances to be selected for future investments.

4.4 Internal Services
TKLN Token
Taklimakan token (TKLN) complies with ERC-20 token standard, and can be transferred to external ERC-20 wallet or traded on 3rd party trading platforms. TKLN is also the internal Taklimakan Platform currency that will be used to compensate platform users (such as analysis, traders, and trading signal providers) for their services. Initially, when users purchase or pre-purchase TKLN tokens during the ICO or pre-ICO, they receive certain amount of TKLN tokens, which they can choose to transfer to an external ECR-20 wallet or leave in their wallet to allow their circulation inside the platform.
Token Economics
TKLN token will be supported by constant stream of revenue from Taklimakan platform. Platform paid services will be priced in fixed amounts of USD and can be purchased for amounts of TKLN equivalent to USD prices according to current exchange rates. Portion of paid services payments will be spent to pay service providers such as analysts, traders, signal providers, etc.
Paid services include:
Paid Subscriptions*
• $10 per month for Premium account
• $25 per month for Expert account
• $100 per month for Pro account
Trader Services
• Portfolio management
• Paid Chats
Analyst Services
• Analytical Reports
• Paid Webinars
• Paid Chats
Trading Instruments
• Trading Signals
• Trading Strategies
Educational Materials
• Articles
• Webinars
• Courses
Crowd Predictions*
• Monthly subscription
• Annual subscription

*Subscriptions can be set up as recurring payments TKLN Tokens from user address. Auto-payment will occur for the next subscription period as soon as previous subscription period expired.

How to Obtain TKLN
In order to obtain TKLN tokens, investors may purchase these tokens during pre-sale or ICO, or, after the ICO is closed on the exchange according to the current market price, where TKLN will be sold by traders, trading signal providers, analysts, or speculators. This mechanism will allow circulation of TKLN token between paid and paying platform users.
Price for the TKLN token shall be:
• Pre-sale: 30,000 tokens per ETH
• ICO: 15,000 tokens per ETH
For both the pre-sale and main sale
• Buyers have access to a bonus based on the amount they purchase. The more they purchase they more of a bonus they earn
• Buyers who purchase more than 10 ETH will be entered into a lottery which will randomly pick and pay out the top 10 buyers
• The only form of payment that is accepted is Ethereum (ETH)
• If buyer sends an amount of ETH that produces a fractional amount of TKLN, they will receive integer number of TKLN tokens that the transferred amount can buy, and the remaining fraction will be refunded
Platform will also facilitate post-ICO purchasing of TKLN from exchanges at market prices for a small platform fee.
TKLN tokens also can be obtained in exchange for services provided by platform users:
• Traders, analysts, and educators will be paid for their work
• Participation in programs such as Crowd Predictions will be rewarded

4.5 Education Services
Platform will facilitate user education for crypto assets and cryptocurrency investments. Experienced users may publish their education materials such as articles, lessons, or courses or organize webinars. Platform will facilitate course and webinar schedules. There will be free and paid educational materials. Paid materials will be available to subscribers similarly to analytics. Educators will be rewarded in TKLN tokens for every paid subscriber.
All useful materials will be collected into a well-organized knowledge base, which will provide free access to many articles. This knowledge base will be continuously supported and expanded by platform moderators, as well as educators. Educators will have capability to limit access to their articles to only paid subscribers.

4.6 Crowd Predictions
Platform will utilize crowd wisdom to predict prices of certain cryptocurrencies or ICO performance for its users.
In order to use this service, users may subscribe to it on monthly or annual basis. Subscription to crowd predictions will be paid in order to create bonus reserve for contributors.
All users may choose to participate in crowd predictions. If they do so, they will be regularly asked questions about their subjective opinion on a cryptocurrency, an asset price or ICO performance. Users will be rewarded for correct answers if their answers are statistically significantly correct. In simple words, we will prevent guessing game using mathematical statistics and reward use of deeper market knowledge.
The examples of questions are:
• What will be the price of BTC in one week?
• Will the XYZ ICO reach their goal?
Paid subscribers will see aggregated answers to the questions, which will include average answer, standard deviation of answers, and prediction probability that is based on previous predictions of similar assets and ICOs. Subscribers will also be able to add their questions to crowd predictions pool of questions.

4.7 Control and Monitoring
Centralized control and monitoring system is designed for supporting high uptime requirement and quick reaction to anomalies observed in system function.
Monitoring is done at four levels:

1. System Level. Data about using of system resources such as CPU, GPU, RAM, Network resources and channels is collected at this level. Monitoring is done by means of selected management solution for server administration or by means of 3rd party agents for metric collection;
2. Infrastructure Application Level. At this level Databases, message buses, and web servers are monitored. Data about health status, activity, and degraded performance is collected. Concrete metrics are defined for each subsystem individually and its purpose and use cases are taken into consideration. Monitoring is conducted with the purpose of reliability and timely service. 3rd party agent applications configured specifically to every object monitored are used to collect metrics.
3. Application Level. This level monitors results of application function: Output to DB, logs, direct transfers of data to monitoring system. Special modules are embedded into applications during development for this purpose. These modules collect information in unified manner. In case if metrics collection is possible by means of collecting application artifacts (created DB records, log files, etc.) specific agent applications will be used to send this collected data to monitoring system.
4. Business Activity Monitoring Level. Business processes are the object of monitoring on this level. This level is used for determining of correctness of system function on the highest level, as well as monitoring changes in user behavior. Based on the analysis of information collected, decisions are made about system development and deployment of new functionality.

Each level of monitoring has its own metrics and performance indicators defined.

4.8 General functionality

Registration and Personal Information
Every user will need to register on the platform in order to access most of its features. During the registration process users will be asked for their personal data such as full name, age, photograph, citizenship, passport number, tax identification, trader resume, etc. Users may choose to remain anonymous, but it will limit their ability to access some features directly related to trading like entrusting funds to traders for management. User’s personal information will be stored off-chain on the secure Taklimakan servers.
Account page on the platform’s web portal will allow users to view and modify some of their personal information, as well as setup external ETH, BTC, ERC-20, etc. wallets for funds input and output.

Subscription Plans
Platform will provide several subscription plans that will allow different access levels to platform features.
• Premium plan will provide full access to educational knowledge base, advanced platform functionality (such as advanced search for experts, etc.
• Expert plan will allow traders and analysts to create mailing lists or publications, and includes tools for traders such as drawing graphs of market data, market indicators and financial accelerators. Also this plan will allow creating articles that include advanced media such as video and images, as well as provide trading tools such as trading signals and strategies. Also, expert plan includes all features of premium plan.
• Pro plan is aimed for managing traders (portfolio managers) and allows creation of investment offers. It also includes all features of premium and expert plans.

Security
User account will be protected by two factor authentication* with a strong password.
All users who choose not to be anonymous will have their identities verified.
*Two-factor authentication is out of scope for MVP.

Communications
Platform will have internal communication feature that will allow users to send messages to each other. Messages may have attributes that associate them with other users, platform objects, or events such as analytics report, signal value, trader, portfolio, etc. For example, a message can be “about” this trader.
*Platform will also have integration with external instant messengers such as WeChat, WhatsApp, Telegram, Viber, etc., which will allow users to send messages outside the platform. Such messages may contain public information that is allowed to be shared with outside users such as free reports, prices, etc.
*Out of scope for MVP

Starter Kits (Marketing Tools)
Newly registered users will receive free promotional items, which are not free otherwise. Examples of such items are free analytical reports, subscriptions of beginning levels, signal values, etc. Users will be notified about their promotional items via internal message from platform, and may activate their item in order to receive it. For example, they may press “Activate” button for a single analytical report subscription and then select the report from the list.
ICO investors will be provided with Premium subscription for 12 months, and all new users will be provided with Premium plan for 1 month.
Providers of paid items will be paid for these items at the regular rate from platform marketing funds.
A starter kit is meant to be a promotion and will discontinue as soon as funds allocated for it are depleted.

Mobile vs. Web functionality
Platform will be available via web interface on desktop devices as well as on mobile browsers. For security and performance reasons mobile applications and web pages may have slightly different functionality.