VizLore Digital Asset Management (Vladam) is a startup from Serbia with a focus on providing seamless cryptocurrency trading experience with enviable returns and predictable volatility. At Vladam, we believe that artificial intelligence is able to identify market patterns and trends beyond human comprehension by combining off-chain and on-chain data. Vladam operates a fully automated cryptocurrency trading platform accessible globally.
Tell us about yourself?
Dr. Sasa Pesic is one of the co-founders of Vladam and its CTO. Before Vladam, he has worked at several highly regarded research institutions and companies provisioning SaaS and PaaS offerings. With a background in financial mathematics, blockchain, AI, and industry-grade software development, Sasa is helping Vladam become a fintech unicorn, the first solution of its kind in Serbia.
If you could go back in time a year or two, what piece of advice would you give yourself?
To go back in time two more years and launch the solution then (:. The crypto market experienced enormous growth in 2017-2020: having been a part of that expansion, we would undoubtedly capture a lot more of the positive trend on the market and acquire more customers much faster.
What problem does your business solve?
Cryptocurrency trading is emotionally taxing, time-consuming, and requires strong background knowledge. It is estimated that more than 95% of crypto traders are losing money. Vladam tackles this problem by introducing a fully automated solution, trades 24/7, and can simultaneously predict price movements by combining more than 30 financial indicators.
What is the inspiration behind your business?
Cryptocurrency trading allows anyone to profit by analyzing markets and trends. Until recently, this was reserved for licensed traders on the stock exchanges. Vladam is introducing the democratization of investment trade by giving users the tools to manage their investment portfolios intelligently.
When relying only on oneself to analyze the crypto market to profit, cryptocurrency trading is a full-time job. It requires hours of constantly looking at the market to identify key moments when to trade. As the co-founders of Vladam, we created the Vladam web platform inspired by our own needs to manage our cryptocurrency portfolios in an automated manner, 24/7, while having the time to do other things. Our customers are individual cryptocurrency traders looking for the same thing – to “outsource” the trading on their crypto-portfolios to a trusted third party and generate passive income. At the same time, they enjoy their regular jobs & hobbies.
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What is your magic sauce?
Vladam differs from its competitors in 2 ways: we use more advanced technology and have a more fair business model.
Our competitors rely on technical market indicators and advanced orders management (e.g., stop loss and take profit limits). Technical indicators that are the outcome of market analysis are lagging: this means that the trend/pattern we are looking for has likely happened sometime before the technical indicators detect it. At Vladam, we developed a unique AI approach based on Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) that can comprehend many financial features to create on-time trading signals. Instead of relying on financial indicators ourselves, we feed them into the DRL neural network capable of learning by doing.
DRL represents a crossover between deep neural networks and agents-based reinforcement learning. Unlike traditional AI models that are trained on datasets pre-annotated with trading signals made by a professional trader, “reinforcement learning refers” to a trial and error approach. This is a novel category of machine learning where intelligent machines, or so-called agents, can learn from their actions, similar to the way humans learn from experience.
Putting it simpler, you are training an AI model the same way you would train your dog: you give it a treat if it acts well. Otherwise, you don’t. The AI model (or the dog) will learn the behavior that has a maximum positive outcome.
Business-model wise, Vladam has NO fixed fees, unlike approximately 90% of our competitors. We do not charge fixed monthly “rent” of our trading strategies and bots, and we do not charge a % of every order we execute in our clients’ accounts.
Vladam’s business model is based on the high-water mark principle, a standard in operating investment funds. The most crucial benefit of using a high-water mark pricing model is that It guarantees that the users will not pay performance-based fees twice for the same amount of performance.
Put: when and only if our customers make a profit, Vladam is entitled to 20% of it. If the customer’s account has a negative investment return at the end of the billing period, Vladam will not charge anything.
These two combined make our magic sauce. We are dedicated to driving the broader adoption of cryptocurrencies. Our core values are to promote trust, transparency, and credibility, and we aim to favor our customers.
What is the plan for the next 5 years? What do you want to achieve?
At the moment, we equally serve significant investment funds (B2B) and individual (B2C) clients. We plan to shift the focus 100% towards the B2C side and grow our client base to 20-30K users in 2023, with a 10-20% monthly growth of the client base.
To begin with, in 2022, we are launching a new set of tools for risk management and portfolio optimization. This will allow our customers to control the risks tied to their active trading strategies (by specifying a stop loss of one or all at once). Moreover, it will enable them to build rich and well-balanced portfolios of existing trading strategies with many cryptocurrencies and multiple exchanges.
On top of that, we plan to open up the Vladam web platform to serve as a marketplace for trading strategies of individual Vladam users and external companies. This means that if you, or your company, have a ready and tested trading strategy, you can “integrate” it with Vladam, where all Vladam users will be able to use it to trade while you and Vladam share the performance fee profits.
Finally, it is necessary to outline that Vladam is a powerful web platform.
We have built Vladam in an entirely modular way allowing us to resell the platform or parts to interested parties that need a similar solution. For example, if you have a trading strategy ready, you can purchase the Vladam web application and immediately get the ball rolling towards potential investors and customers.
While many solutions in cryptocurrency exchanges are resold in this way, Vladam would be the first trading strategy management platform that can be white-labeled and reused.
What is the biggest challenge you’ve faced so far?
Historically, looking long-term, we have observed that our trading strategies achieve high returns on investment. However, short-term market volatility sometimes causes too significant losses for some customers to handle emotionally.
Thus, they are prone to giving up sooner and not waiting for the positive movements that lead to profit. Our AI department is working very hard to predict market volatility better and reduce the higher risks for some of our trading strategies.
How do people get involved/buy into your vision?
Vladam is a globally available solution. We are present in several crypto-communities and on social media. Anyone looking to try out Vladam can visit our website, register, select a trading strategy and start trading in less than 10 minutes.
Vladam has a Sandbox environment allowing you to test our solution without committing actual funds for those who want to be more careful. This will enable people to quickly get to know the details of crypto commerce so that when they decide to enter the market, they understand the process and risk well.
At Vladam, we value transparency above all others. Our trading strategies are present on our website, with the fully disclosed actual performance one year back. Customers can use this information to make an educated decision on which strategy to choose.
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