Caspian - On-Boarding Institutional Money Into Crypto

Institutional Money

"When the institutional money shows up we'll all get Lambos!" How many of you have heard someone say something like this? It seems to be a staple in the community, this idea that once the institutional money enters the market, early investors will get massive gains. It's not just the crypto investors saying this, however, but also many ICO's pitch that value proposition fairly hard. You often hear from ICO's that you should invest with a sense of urgency before the big money shows up. Whether you approve of the tactics used by many investors and ICO's to try and pump their favorite project, it's hard to deny that getting institutional money into the crypto space would massively pump the market. Many people have speculated on when the institutional money might magically arrive, but very few have worked to build solutions that will allure those investors into the cryptocurrency space. In a market that's seemed a bit gassed out at times recently, one of the most efficient catalysts to get things moving upward would be a successful project that creates real utility to fund managers. This is where Caspian comes in!

What is Caspian?

Caspian Website

Caspian offers institutional investors, fund managers, and dedicated crypto traders a platform with a full set of tools for managing crypto assets across multiple exchanges. It hinges upon 6 primary features to form a full trading stack.

OEMS

OEMS stands for "Order Execution Management System" and is one of the main building blocks of the Caspian ecosystem. It allows a user to connect to multiple trading exchanges and manage their assets wherever they live.

Check out this demonstration of the OEMS product:

PMS

PMS stands for "Portfolio Management System" and is the feature that allows a user to get a birds-eye view of their entire portfolio. For those of you invested in many projects, you likely know the struggle of getting a solid portfolio view of your data. The PMS product within Caspian makes this formerly difficult task a breeze!

Check out this demonstration of the PMS product:

Compliance

The Compliance product allows users to customize a set of compliance related rules and checks as well as provides a full audit trail of activities. This makes it easy to automatically set any restrictions needed to work with your customers or your organization. For example, let's say that for certain types of projects, you can only make an initial investment of $X and you set up a rule in the system to stay compliant. One of your fund managers accidentally attempts to purchase more than $X, but is saved when the trade does not go through and instead an alert reminds that manager that trades have to be under $X.

Risk

Since PMS (above) has made it possible to have a portfolio view, Caspian's Risk product can be used to create simulation-based scenarios for the portfolio to analyze risk better. This will help fund managers to make the best informed decisions on the portfolios they offer.

Reporting

Since Caspian is integrated into exchanges/wallets that a user manages through the system, it can also provide it's user with a plethora of reporting capabilities. These reports are customizable and can be run on anything from portfolio holdings to trading history. The data can also be exported into other formats such as .pdf and .xlsx if you wish to present it to someone else.

Algorithms

Algorithms allow a Caspian user to trade more effectively and across multiple exchanges simultaneously. For example, let's say a large investment firm wants to grab a significant amount of Bitcoin. If they were to simply pick an exchange and put a buy order for the amount they want to pay, they might create a bit of a wall in the trade view. The order may take a long time to process and there is no guarantee that they would fill that order if the market changed before all the BTC got purchased. With Caspian Algorithms, they could have purchased the entire quantity of BTC desired across multiple exchanges quickly and effectively. This would make sure that they got all the BTC desired for the price range they were looking to buy within.

How Does it Work?

To start with, check out this demo trailer that concisely gives an overview of the platform:

The Caspian team already has created some video demonstrations for it's OEMS and PMS products as shown above and is well on it's way down the roadmap already. In order to accomplish all the goals set forth on the whitepaper, there is a need for a native token that can be used when utilizing such an expansive set of features. For this purpose, Caspian uses an ERC-20 token (CSP) on the Ethereum blockchain which provides a few primary functions.

Commission Discount

Although you are not required to hold CSP to use the Caspian ecosystem, the team has developed an incentive for users to hold CSP in the form of discounted transaction fees. There are a few methods for attaining such a discount. You can either stake CSP tokens in the platform, pay in CSP tokens for a discount, or qualify for a dynamic discount. Although the dynamic discount is still being determined (keep an eye out for updates from the team on this), the other two methods are easy to use and can save a lot of money over time, as the discounts can reach up to 25% if enough CSP is staked or spent.

Third-Party Development

With so much talent in the crypto environment, Caspian recognized that there is a whole ocean of untapped talent and ideas at their fingertips. So, to make sure that there is a mutually beneficial reason for those with good ideas to offer up solutions, they've included the ability to incentivize such initiatives within the platform. Let's say a small group of software developers have created a better way of charting cryptocurrency price action. Those people could either sell their application through Caspian so users could use it integrated with the Caspian platform, or have token holders stake their CSP tokens in order to use the third-party tool. If the Caspian team found the solution valuable enough, they may also deploy some additional incentives to the project. To stimulate participation from third-party providers, there will be some development related bounties introduced by the team in exchange for CSP tokens as well.

Governance

The top 15 token stakeholders will be able to help guide development. This makes sure that those who are most invested in this project have a say in the future direction. The whitepaper states that those who are among the 15 top stakeholders will receive an additional 5% discount on trading fees and collectively have influence on a minimum of 25% of the development initiatives.

Additional Information

If you're hungry for more information about the project, check out this DTube video where I walk through the 6 primary products offered by the Caspian platform:

Also, check out below for a couple additional videos for more information.
Crypto Bobby Interview
Tora and Kenetic Interview

How Can I be Involved?

According to the Caspian Whitepaper, the market cap of 325 billion USD logged in April of 2018 will eventually be a drop in the bucket with projections of a 10 trillion USD equivalent by 2033. Blockchain is revolutionary technology and the ground-work is almost complete for massive growth in the industry. Usability of the biggest blockchain projects such as Bitcoin is growing all the time with the implementation of online shops and bitcoin ATM's in major cities. The ability for institutional money to enter the market on a massive scale has been one of the largest obstacles for extraordinary growth.

Caspian is set to kick off it's ICO public sale in September and already has more than 25 exchanges connected to it including Gemini, BitMex, and Airswap. See this update on Medium for additional information regarding the upcoming token sale. Also, check out the Caspian airdrop/bounty challenge here where the first 5000 Steemians are eligable to receive a bonus 0.5 STEEM along with the bounty rewards! Most of all, I recommend joining the Telegram group if you're interested in this project, as it will be one of the quickest methods to gather information and the most up-to-date way to see what's happening with Caspian!

Resources
Website
WhitePaper
Steemit
YouTube
Telegram

This post is a submission in the @originalworks writing competition for Caspian
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