Adding Numeraire (NMR) to Compound

Proposal to add NMR to Compound:
Motivation:

Participants in the Numerai tournament stake NMR on their predictions to earn more NMR. Participants often want to increase their stake to reflect their confidence that their models will continue to have good performance. However, participants might not be comfortable sacrificing their exposure to other crypto assets to increase their investment in NMR. Alternatively, long-term NMR holders do not receive any interest or return on their holdings. Adding NMR to Compound would match these potential lenders who expect to continue to hold NMR with tournament participants who expect to earn NMR. This would provide holders with a stable return and allow participants to increase their stakes without the opportunity cost associated with selling their other cryptocurrencies for additional NMR.

Background:

Numerai is a new kind of hedge fund built by a network of data scientists. It uses NMR to incentivize anonymous data scientists around the world to collaborate to create predictive models for global equities. It was founded in 2015 by Richard Craib and is headquartered in San Francisco, California. NMR is paid out to participants each week as a percentage of their staked NMR, based on how accurate their predictions were over 1 month of evaluation on live stock market data. NMR is not paid out based on actual hedge fund performance and NMR holders do not otherwise receive any dividend or return based on hedge fund performance.

Comments:
There is high interests from Numerai participants in enabling borrowing NMR. Borrowing/lending is regularly discussed in the Numerai RocketChat: Numerai Community. There are also regular visitors to the RocketChat that express interest in staking on participants’ models because they otherwise have no way to get a return on their NMR holdings. NMR is already tradeable on Coinbase (Numeraire Price Chart (NMR) | Coinbase).

2 Likes

I submitted this post before the Request for Protocol Improvement Ideas (and COMP Grant Eligibility) post was created, it just took a day to get approved. If this thread is now redundant given I put the same information in the broader “Improvements” thread, I can delete this one.

1 Like