Welcome to the inaugural AQTIS Quarterly. These articles will provide a high-level overview of all the work the team has done in the last three months, as well as add some context as to what’s to come for the relevant AQTIS teams further down the line.
AQTIS Quarterly is broken up into distinct sections:
- Tech / Dev Round-Up: An exploration of what the dev team has been working on.
- Product Round-Up: This captures other developments that have taken place that might not fit with the above two labels. This includes content, marketing, and changes to how we’re building AQTIS.
- Quant Round-Up: A closer look at how the technology underpins the AQTIS ecosystem.
Tech / Dev Round-Up
This quarter the dev team has been super busy building out all of the requirements needed to ensure the AQTIS LSDs will be stable and secure. Highlights can be found below:
- LSD Smart Contract Development — We spent considerable time developing the LSD smart contracts in Q4, making substantial progress in finalizing core functionalities. Various challenges have been overcome to make the contracts both sustainable and optimized for our unique reward mechanism, based on Time-Weighted Average Balance (TWAB). We have completed testing and deployment on the Ethereum testnet and all smart contracts are stable.
- Wallet Implementation and Ongoing Improvements — We successfully integrated RainbowKit into the AQTIS dApp. This implementation allowed us to create a super smooth user experience both when it comes to connecting your wallet and interacting with the AQTIS dApp platform.
- Distribute Rewards Mechanism — We’ve been building out the framework for the AQTIS rewards mechanism to ensure everything works as it should when the LSDs go live.
- Feature Development — We are building a mechanism for automated distribution of rewards by incorporating Chainlink Keepers for the periodic distribution of your rewards. In addition we’re working on other features:
- Auto Distribution Rewards — We’ve successfully built Smart Contracts for automated distribution of rewards. This means your yield will automatically be sent to you.
- Auto Compounding — Another option for the AQTIS LSD community: auto-compounding. This feature allows LSD holders to automatically re-invest rewards to create compound interest.
- Compose strategies — We’ve been building the Smart Contract that facilitates buying LSDs based on the chosen strategy by the end-user. This unique feature, once live will allow a user to pick and choose the right combination of AQTIS LSDs for them.
Looking ahead
In Q1 2024, we will be putting the finishing touches to the UX and UI, as well as continuing to test and ensure all functionality is stable, our gas utilization is as efficient as possible, and all the unique features of the AQTIS dApp work as they should.
One of the key jobs in Q1 will be Whitelisting Addresses for Beta Testing. We will be inviting some members of the community to take part in this. If it’s of interest please get in touch.
We are also expanding our development team and are currently looking for a Solidity Developer. If you’re interested you can find more here.
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Product Round-Up
The focus for AQTIS Product this quarter was on building out the Foundations ahead of the launch of AQTIS LSDs, due to take place at the end of Q1 2024. This involved several key steps.
- Building out the documentation: We continued to produce content weekly explaining how key parts of the AQTIS ecosystem work. We wanted to give readers a series of simple guides that lay out in detail the mechanics of AQTIS and provide a more holistic overview of how key parts of the project interact with each other. You can find these documents on our GitBook page.
- Twitter Spaces: We kicked off our monthly Twitter Spaces series. Each month The Writer, The Marketeer and The Architect answer questions posed by the AQTIS community. Take a listen to Episode 1 and Episode 2.
- AQTIS Roadmap: In Q4 of 2023 we revealed the roadmap for the first six months of 2024. This included details of the aspects of the AQTIS ecosystem we hope to deliver to the community. You can take a closer look here.
- AQTIS Dashboard — We shared a sneak peek at the AQTIS Dashboard that will be launched to help community members keep track of their portfolios on AQTIS. You can find that here.
- New Hires — The AQTIS team grew in Q4 2023!
- Senior Data Scientist — A renowned expert in artificial intelligence with a Ph.D in the subject and has held associate professor roles at several universities. He has honed his skills on cutting-edge projects for Google, MIT, Telefonica and Bank of America and he has led multiple AI-related Proof of Concepts (PoCs) at a prominent multinational technology company.
- Head of Content — The writer has spent more than two decades working as a journalist for newspapers, magazines, and websites. He jumped into the crypto space in late 2017, and ended up launching one of the largest web3 media companies. Since then he has worked on a layer 1 blockchain leading all content creation, but now helps AQTIS refine its tone of voice, and produce content consistently every week that is simple and easy to understand.
- Operations Manager — The Planner has a background in computer science, and has worked as a Solidity developer and technical consultant in crypto across two continents since 2017. A Dutchie currently situated in Milan, the Planner has also plied her trade working as a Business Analyst in the Dutch financial sector. At AQTIS, the Planner focuses on project management, timeline coordination, and overall operations for a smooth period towards launch in Q1 2024.
- GTM Strategy — Last, but certainly not least, the Marketeer has completed the Go To Market Strategy which will kick in during Q1 2024. This strategy lays out how AQTIS will approach launching its LSDs and how to spread the word. This is an internal document and as such, is not shared publicly, but it will be implemented soon.
Looking ahead
The AQTIS product is on track for its slated launch in Q1 2024. We will begin our Go To Market Campaign, produce new documentation, as well as create more content for the AQTIS Medium Page.
We will continue with our Twitter Spaces, and continue to produce content that is easy and simple to navigate, across all platforms including Medium and an email newsletter. More on that in 2024!
Quant Round-Up
Our co-founder and the data scientist spent much of Q4 2024, testing and refining the strategies that form the backbone of our Quant Tech system. A summary can be found below:
- Final Refinements to Trend-Following Strategy — The team completed the testing and refining work on the Trend-Following strategy. Extensively verified across our chosen trading assets, it has shown remarkable success. Especially effective in longer timeframes, this strategy has outperformed traditional hold strategies in over 50% of the assets by adeptly detecting upward trends and exiting during downturns.
- Built and deployed BTC Perp Alerts Signal — Over in Discord, we built and deployed a free signal for the AQTIS community called “BTC Perp Alerts.” This tool monitors changes in open interest, allowing us to accurately predict asset movements and for our Discord members to use how they see fit.
- Built a Portfolio Optimization Model — We successfully developed our first model for continuous portfolio optimization. This model allows us to fit the optimal weighting for every strategy within our portfolio, maximizing our efficiency and performance as market conditions change.
- Development and research on Market Making & DEX MM Bot — we have been conducting research on an AI and Quant Tech-Powered Market Making tool for $AQTIS and the creation of a DEX Market Maker bot.
- Upgraded our data acquisition and processing techniques — in Q4, we made significant strides to upgrade our models to lower timeframes to enable a more nuanced understanding of what’s happening in the markets. As a result, we’re harnessing data directly from exchanges using WebSockets, ensuring that we ingest data at the finest resolution offered by the exchange: tick level or microsecond. This allows us to create aggregated versions from multiple exchanges in real-time, helping us further understand the differences between exchanges.
- Historical data acquisition — Before Q4, our analysis and backtesting primarily revolved around Binance and Binance Futures. This quarter we acquired historical data from all exchanges since 2019. This endeavor allowed us to uncover unique edges in the behavior of each exchange.
- Better data sources — We incorporated a third-party data source to allow our machine-learning algorithm to stabilize returns and minimize drawdowns, significantly enhancing the overall robustness of our strategies.
Looking ahead
The Quant team will be spending Q1 making continued refinements to the strategies and trading tools that power the AQTIS ecosystem.
We hope you all had a wonderful holiday and are as excited as our team for the coming year!
❓ Questions or Feedback?
As always, we’re eager to answer all your questions and consider your suggestions. We’d love to hear your thoughts, so please share them in our Discord.
That’s all for now. Stay tuned for more exciting updates, and we’ll catch you in the next one!
