ARTX: Follow-Up October & Future

4 min readOct 3, 2022

ATLAS 1.0

During this summer we have completed the development, test and integration of our new smart portfolio strategy called ATLAS 1.0.

ATLAS 1.0 is a Long-Only, Smart Beta & Hedging investment strategy that aims to obtain alpha and lower risk. It seeks the best composition of an optimally diversified portfolio, combining efficient-market hypothesis and trend investing.

Our goal was to deploy part of the Yield Feeding Pool capital on this strategy (running on CEX) during September. However, we have been postponing the deployment due to market conditions and macroeconomic timing.

ATLAS 1.0 is a strategy that does not require very active trading, nor does it perform many intraday trades on hundreds of different assets. These features allow us to implement it more effectively in DEXs and through the use of Vaults, to allow third parties to participate in it.

We still believe that cryptocurrency is a market that will continue its uptrend and reach new highs in the future, that is why we want to have this strategy ready to be deployed also through DEX when the time comes.

In the meantime, we will try and wait for a more appropriate time in the market to deploy the Yield Feeding Pool capital in a Long-Only strategy.

Trading Strategies & Barriers

In our desire to move more and more towards decentralized capital management, we have analyzed how our algorithmic trading strategies could be applied in a decentralized environment.

We have encountered two barriers that make the strategies as we had developed them during the first year, not operational in this environment.

On the one hand, by making relatively fast and intraday trades, the margins are very tight and the fees that DEX have on ETH make them no longer profitable trades.

On the other hand, if we move to a cheaper L1 or L2 where fees are not relevant (e.g. Polygon), our strategies for risk management need dozens of assets on which to operate and, in these networks, liquidity has decreased a lot in recent months, so that trades that are made in assets that are not the main ones have a large impact on the price, which also has a very negative effect on the profitability of those trades (and often make it unpredictable when backtesting).

For all these reasons, we have progressed towards the development of investment strategies that do not require so many operations (ATLAS 1.0) and, above all, in Market Neutral Strategies, such as the provision of liquidity in AMMs.

Decentralized Investment

We continue to move towards fully decentralized fund management, allowing us to manage not only the Yield Feeding Pool but also any capital that third parties may wish to make available to our strategies.

To this end, we started looking into different protocols that could be used for this purpose (TokenSets, Enzyme, etc). However, it is not easy or quick to put all the pieces together:

1. Investment strategies optimized for this ecosystem.
2. Order automation, capital management, intermediary software.
3. Predictability of strategies, backtesting.
4. Proper functioning of all systems in production.

We are currently focused on the development of points 2 and 3, to try to ensure an automated operation through these protocols.

Market Neutral Strategies

We have also decided to start developing in parallel market neutral strategies, such as liquidity provision in the AMMs.

This type of automated investment strategies, thanks to their integration with the aforementioned protocols and the decentralized management philosophy, make them very attractive for decoupling from the market trend, something we also consider fundamental.

Of course, success in the implementation of these strategies depends on continuing to develop the infrastructure that allows us to manage and automate operations through the blockchain and decentralized exchanges.

The Future of ARTX

We are going slowly, but determined. Since the launch of the project, we have experienced one of the worst bear markets and one of the most unstable macroeconomic situations in recent decades. This is devastating for a project of our characteristics. However, we do not want to complain about that anymore. And from now on we have no choice but to try to rebuild a solid project that achieves the successes it is aiming for.

We have had to adapt and pivot towards more solid and sustainable places within the ecosystem, which has slowed down our pace of development.

We would like to ask for your understanding. At the beginning of the project we were a team of quants specialized in the development of algorithms and investment strategies. Over time, we are also needing knowledge of blockchain and architecture and systems development that were not what we needed at the beginning (as we were working exclusively on CEX).

During these last months we have lost time and money (like many other projects and players in the ecosystem), but the core team is fully committed and moving forward with the project.

We are at a time when it is important to rethink the way we work and, certainly, the structure of ARTX as a project, always with the aim of being as well positioned as possible for the future.

For this reason we also ask the whole community for any contribution, idea or proposal that will help us to achieve our objectives.

We want ARTX to be a reference in decentralized and autonomous, specialized, free and uncensored capital management. And we are committed to achieve it.