See the original story in Japanese.

Tokyo-basedFactbase announced a cryptocurrency-focused market forecast platform called Signal at Blockchain Expo, which just finished in Santa Clara, US last week. Coinciding with this announcement, the company began accepting pre-registration for use of the service.

Factbase was founded in November by Osaka University alumni Yusuke Takahashi and other members. The team recognized that distribution flow of news updates and other elements likely to produce price fluctuations in cryptocurrencies are totally different from those for legal currencies. The Signal platform provides two functions: a web-based dashboard called Signal Board offering market forecast and analysis, and a notification service called Signal Alerts which lets users know via the LINE messaging app when an event likely to greatly impact price fluctuation of a cryptocurrency occurs.

Takahashi explained:

For example, presidents of Bank of Japan never tweet about banking policy or strategy. In contrast, information distributed online is likely to reflect price fluctuation of cryptocurrecies, and the information flow of it is also unique. Most of this kind of information is publicly available online, which usually gets bigger and bigger thorugh communities of mining users and others, and eventually snowball into big news with huge impact. […]

Hence, anyone can gain access to information resources which may alter the trend of cryptocurrencies, but it’s hard to organize this kind of information and understand its context because of too much miscellaneous information being included. The Signal platform leverages big data and artificial intelligence to help users organize it and understand the context more accurately.

In view of other areas where publicly disclosed information is likely to alter market trends, when a listed company announces their financial statement, hedge funds and institutional investors first sell or buy the company’s shares based on it, and then individual investors follow, which eventually leads to price fluctuations for the market.

In contrast to legal currencies or stock prices, not only the mechanisms behind securing values but also those leading to price fluctuations have become decentralized for cryptocurrencies. For cryptocurrency investors, keeping their eyes on announcements from Federal Reserve Bank or Bank of Japan by watching CNBC or reading the Nikkei would not suffice upon catching market trends. It is here the Signal platform can create a niche opportunity that can provide investors a new value.

The Signal platform curates timelines and posts by crawling Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, GitHub and other websites, and analyzes them from different viewpoints using Natural Language Processing to see whether each article has a positive or negative context. They will initially start with Bitcoin out of many cryptocurrency options. Generally speaking, it’s difficult to distinguish between news updates on Bitcoin and those on Bitcoin Cash, but we were told that the company’s technology can realize it by leveraging their proprietary algorithm.

We are currently focused on curating, organizing and analyzing information. We are planning to start publishing reports in partnership with cryptocurrency-focused market analysts. In addition, we intend to publish a sort of “Cryptocurrency market index” based on calculation using our proprietary algorithm. […]

Our mission is to offer optimized collecting information on cryptocurrency investment by forecasting a fluctuation in prices.

Going forward the company plans to introduce a so-called “development index” for every cryptocurrency. Since the ecosystem of cryptocurrencies is a real mix of wheat and chaff, these indexes will help cryptocyrrency investors understand, for example, which ICO (initial coin offering) campaigns are well organized or plain irresponsible. The team aims to acquire a million users in two years from now, planning to expand the service into English and Korean languages.

Factbase has secured a seed funding from multiple unnamed angel investors. Takahashi says the company is hiring data analysts, data scientists and “engineers who are likely to feel ecstasy upon collecting information” for further service development of the platform.

Translated by “Tex” Pomeroy