By: Jeremy
A handful of years back, deep in the southern remote part of Costa Rica, Atlas Null and his family were just looking for some basic internet from an internet cafe. Atlas, smarter than your normal 13-year-old, didn’t think that his journey in crypto would start at such a young age. But lo and behold, he and his family bumped into someone who educated them about the intelligence blockchain known as Bittensor. Although Atlas, also known as Barbarian, didn’t know how to even use a command line at the time, he soon started on the path of becoming the founder of the network’s top signal machine subnet, Mantis (Subnet 123).
As illustrated in Punisher’s article in August, Mantis, subnet 123, utilizes miners to create models in order to predict the prices of digital assets and fiat currencies in a short time frame. How does this prediction service’s architecture differentiate from others?
Mantis’ Genius Design
Mantis has a unique architecture that creates a miner ensemble identifying the best binary signals and predictions on assets such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, and multiple fiat currencies on an intraday timeframe. Rewards are distributed to the miners with the highest accuracy. Miners submit encrypted predictions for prices or time series data and then a meta-model aggregates them into one powerful signal.
Validators confirm which uploaded embeddings from the miners predict the most accurate signals, scoring based on each miner’s real marginal contribution to the overall performance.
To earn rewards, models need to beat randomness of around 53-55% accuracy or better, with only the top 20-30 out of 256 miners truly shining through.
Barbarian is very aware of what the subnet can and cannot do. He is focused on very short-term intraday targets and steering away from unattainable targets such as a 5-minute interval or a 5-day interval. This is something that nobody in the industry is doing right now.
But beyond that, subnets across the ecosystem have miners that produce multiple UIDs and try to extract value without producing results that will improve the network. This is what’s called a sybil attack. Barbarian’s clever and novel design with lightweight codebase at just 1,400 lines essentially makes copycats and redundant non-unique signals very unprofitable.
The combination of economic incentives, identifying one-of-a-kind signals, and finding miners that really make a difference creates an environment that truly allows the top 20 miners to make an impact and get the rewards they deserve.
How Does Mantis Compare to Its Counterparts?
During a Novelty Search episode, Sam Dare from subnet 3 Templar brought up whether Mantis was similar to Numerai, a well-known and longstanding blockchain predictions project. Barbarian mentioned that while Numerai has a network of contributors trying to come up with the best predictions possible, Mantis’ differentiation comes from the ability to swiftly incentivize and reward miners for their accurate predictions.
He also explained that the architecture of Mantis, unique and different from Numerai, focuses on decentralized AI-driven forecasting that rewards high-quality, information-rich financial predictions in a way that’s market-ready.
Mantis Plan for Revenues
As far as the future of revenues for the up-and-coming subnet, Barbarian knows that once the signals are top-notch, monetization will not be an issue whatsoever. Short-term plans are to auction off the signals, with a public beta of the auction launching in the next 7 days or so, plus on-chain signal notarization to make it all verifiable.
The long-term plan is to get large-scale buyers of the signals, and even dive into live trading with current network outputs for real-world proof. Sure, building trust for things like private servers in trading raises some governance questions, but the potential is massive.
Alpha Token Holder Benefits
Atlas plans on potentially distributing the revenues to the alpha token holders. Mantis is also planning a buyback in the near future with first one expected in about 2.5 weeks. This will create a buying flywheel to increase the valuation of the project.
Mantis subnet holders will also be part of selecting which assets to develop signals on and influence other parts of the Mantis operation, like the upcoming sub-subnet for metadata optimization that’s in the works to make incentives even faster and less accuracy-dependent.
What’s Mantis’ Ultimate Utility?
Places like BlackRock and other investment firms have their own proprietary quants that produce these various signals. Mantis on the other hand is creating a synthesized self-improving dynamic operation to create similar, if not better, signals than these multi-billion dollar firms utilize in-house. These aren’t just raw predictions but a validated collective meta-signal that’s rare and ready for financial players.
In the event that the alpha token holders are able to accrue dividends through revenue of these high-quality signals, the rewards will be greater than anyone could imagine. As Atlas wittily said, “If you have a signal that gets its predictions right 60% of the time you will inherently make money and the value is absolutely there.”
Are We Witnessing the Next Vitalik?
When you hear Atlas speak, you know there is something special about him. The conviction, the technical know-how, the intelligence, and the vision totally scream Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum. Your normal everyday 16-year-old is out playing with their friends, trying to get good grades in high school, and maybe thinking about what college they want to go to in the future. Atlas is busy building a world-class signal machine.
Barbarian may be young, but he is actually one of the most long-standing veterans in the entire Bittensor ecosystem. He has been there from the beginning and has a unique and one-of-a-kind understanding of the Bittensor ecosystem as a whole. He is laser-focused on making the subnet the best and top-of-the-class signal machine in the entire world.
When Sam Dare praised his amazing ability to blend incentives and miner inputs, he simply said that it wasn’t where he wanted it to be. And that in essence is who Atlas really is. He’s a perfectionist, a consummate professional, blessed with a beautiful mind. Buckle your seatbelts, because this kid is going to take Bittensor to the next level.
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