Using blockchain to promote public welfare, Wayne Yee, Crypto Commonwealth

Interesting interview with Wayne Yee, Crypto Commonwealth founder.

What is your own background briefly?

I have many years of quantitative alpha research experience in hedge funds, and managed and researched market neutral equity strategies with good performance. Before that, I participated in the search for the Higgs boson out of the vast data collected in Fermilab. The work and the ongoing research at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider led to the discovery of the Higgs boson, the Nobel Prize winner in physics 2013. I obtained a B.S. degree in physics from University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), and a Ph.D. degree in Physics from Stony Brook University.

Does it seem like a logical background to what you do now?

My modeling and research experience in asset management gave me peculiar insights in the crypto market, a popular emerging market with a huge potential. I published a number of quantitative analysis on our website cryptocommonwealth.io and was the first to investigate the smart betas in the crypto domain.

This is a widely known idea for passive and semi-active stock funds, yet hardly explored by any financial professionals before me. And in the good old days my collaborators and I published in major physics journals including Physical Review Letters and the Physical Review series of American Physical Society (APS).

I peer reviewed many journal papers as well, and keep doing so to-date upon invitations. It is an enjoyable experience, and for a similar reason I reviewed a large number of crypto projects and whitepapers too, hence became familiar with typical tokenomics design. These can all be done efficiently, owing to the days that I read, reviewed and published physics papers.

Moreover, either strategy or research I conducted requires strong modeling and advanced statistical tools such as machine learning. An analogy would be to look for a needle in the haystack, where big data analytics is strongly desired. Data analysis and modeling in cryptos, stocks and physics highly resemble one another.

How was the last 12 months?

We assembled a great team, and made a few great videos that convey our core values well. We donated medical masks to support China’s fight. We had good press exposure and many more will come soon. Our token was listed and will continue to embark on more major exchanges. We promoted successfully in social media. Now we have over 40k organic members in two main Telegram groups, and many more in our local language chats.

We initiated the asset management and publishing ecosystem. The internal research backtester is up and running, so are two of our funds. Publications on our main site are ongoing. We are building an e-print site and ETA is several months. It will operate under our US based NPO and offer grants to scholars. Many more will come in 2020, see our roadmap and whitepaper . Stay tuned for another year of prosperity with us!

1 min pitch for what you are doing now / why did you launch Crypto Commonwealth?

I’ve been in the asset management industry for many years. This industry pays well and has been highly lucrative, yet I wondered a lot if I was really making the world a better place like an entrepreneur in the tech industry. On the other hand, with a carefully designed economic model and healthy token distribution structure on blockchain, I see a good way to promote public welfare as well as utilizing my professional skills in asset management and quant research.

Moreover, I’ve been a highly academic person and enjoy my days in academia very much. I believe there are a lot we can do to improve the existing publishing model and make it better. The scientific publishing world has been overly centralized. Scholars and institutions submit articles, peer review for one another, pay for subscription and publishing charges. There has been a stunning profit margin in the scientific publishing industry, estimated at well above 30% and much higher than prestigious tech companies like Apple and Google.

Yet scholars and the academic community hardly get the compensation they deserved. That’s the incentive to build the COMM project – an innovative nonprofit scientific publisher that offers fair compensation to authors in its decentralized, dedicated digital ecosystem with tokenomics. We are the one and only serious crypto project aiming for that.

What sort of stories do you plan to cover?

We are the world’s first peer reviewed scientific publisher on blockchain, and the world’s first crypto smart beta provider with good strategy transparency – I published the very first paper to discuss such risk premiums on our website. And we are issuing the world’s very first Convertible Crypto Bond, CBND (‘C Bond’ or ‘COMM’s Bond’) to promote the liquidity and locking transparency in our COMM token sales for varied lock periods. We’ve scheduled huge press exposure before and during our ICO, to be conducted throughout March 2020. Stay tuned!

What are your goals in 2020 for CC?

Our first round of ICO is coming in early March. Three rounds are in plan for the year 2020, each capped at around 10% of total supply at varied discounts off the market price. We are building an e-print hosting site, which would be permanently free and open to scholars for preprint publications. We initiated a guest writer program and encourage interested authors to register and publish with us, see here: https://forms.gle/ELiVHyPpYPpZDzDN9.

We will list in more prestigious exchanges, invite portfolio managers, researchers and scholars to join us and share the tokens with them in compensation. And we’ve been actively designing and developing a dedicated COMM mainnet, with some functionalities potentially available for early release later this year.

Tell us about your team / who do you have onboard so far?

We are a group of portfolio managers, quantitative researchers, senior data / IT engineers, scholars, and crypto experts with varied backgrounds. Most of us hold advanced degrees in quantitative disciplines, and come from prestigious universities or academic institutions including Harvard, MIT, National University of Singapore, Fermilab, Chinese Academy of Science, Peking University, USTC. We have people from renowned tech, asset management and investment banking backgrounds such as Heming from Google, Jackey from Cadence, myself from Worldquant and, George from TD Bank.

We have a senior crypto editor, with millions of unique monthly views as our chief editor. We have a USDC core developer and principal engineer, Zhiyu, from reputed crypto exchanges (Circle and Poloniex) as our codebase preparer. Last but not least, we have one of the strongest advisory boards including professor and doctoral supervisor in top university, senior derivative quant, and #1 ranked advisors on first-tier rating sites including ICO Bench and ICO Holder. We saw abundant investment opportunities in the highly volatile yet rapidly growing crypto markets, and decided to build together a decentralized digital ecosystem intended for the benefit of the most.

How can people find out more about Crypto Commonwealth?

Please see our dedicated ICO site cryptocommonwealth.co and main site cryptocommonwealth.io for our publications, vision, corporate spirit, team, ongoing campaigns, hiring plans, preliminary interview questions, and a recommended book list for your amusement during preparations. And follow our social media for more updates:

Whitepaper: https://cryptosmartbeta.com/wp-content/uploads/docs/whitepaper_en.pdf

Twitter: https://twitter.com/CryptoSmartBeta

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Crypto-Commonwealth-102262581218579/

Telegram: https://t.me/Crypto_Commonwealth_Europe

Telegram channel: https://t.me/CryptoCommonwealth_ANN

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/cryptocommonwealth

Founder’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wayne-yee-15957857/

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qL16SGyx0Nc&list=PLPUGS–z1oahl610rxhq8YuKJ1PTqbvFv

Medium: https://medium.com/@CryptoCommonwealth

Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/user/CryptoSmartBeta

GitHub: https://github.com/CryptoCommonWealth

Bitcointalk: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5201899.new#new

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/crypto_smart_beta/

BTC and ether seem to be rising again, what does the crypto world look like for 2020 and beyond?

We stand firmly in support of financial fairness, democracy and liberty that Bitcoin provides globally. The number of users has been increasing steadily, indicating more and more trust and adoption in the public. There are always ups and downs in an exciting and emerging market like cryptos. Our study showed the annual volatility of Bitcoin is over 80%, with much higher numbers among the altcoins.

It will be a bumpy ride for sure, yet a bright future awaits us as the world gradually understands what decentralized digital technology on universal equivalents brings us – stronger trust, fairer compensation, higher class mobility, more efficient collaboration, greater productivity and enhancement in humanity.

Who and where do you get inspiration from?

I read lots of science fiction from Issac Asimov, Orson Card, GRRM, Cixin Liu and many more. They inspired me to pursue a Ph.D. in physics and seek the nature of the world at the subatomic level, then the macroscopic, behavioral dynamics within the social science, finance, and asset management domains. I also enjoyed reading philosophy from Arthur Schopenhauer and Ludwig Wittgenstein, as well as the fundamentals of psychoanalysis from Sigmund Freud. Moreover, I watched over a thousand movies, mostly top ranked on imdb.com.

I composed a novel, and have been authoring a collection of philosophical essays, due to publish as the first few potential subprojects on the COMM mainnet. A wide scope of experience enabled me to form unique perceptions upon the world order, and find efficient ways to do things right across varied fields, including physics, quantitative research and tokenomics design.

Anything else you’d like to add / we should have asked?

Yes -> Why is the project called “Crypto Commonwealth”?

A commonwealth is a traditional English term for a political community founded for the common good. Historically, it has sometimes been synonymous with “republic”. Meanwhile, the noun “commonwealth”, meaning “public welfare general good or advantage”, dates from the 15th century and can be interpreted as literally “Common Wealth”.

We are committed to building a crypto commonwealth and make the world a better place. Please see here for our core values.

What are your core values that distinguish you from other crypto projects?

Our introduction video on Youtube demonstrates our core values well. Three languages supported: English, Japanese, Chinese.

1. We believe in Hayek’s theory, that the free competition of currencies enables consensus-based, bottom-up, progressive, peaceful and sustained wealth redistributions, which, upon the execution of righteous monetary policy, can fundamentally increase fairness in the distribution of social achievements and foster the continuing growth of civilization.
2. We are dedicated to endowing all explorations of new knowledge with economic value and returns, and endeavor to advance the frontiers of multiple disciplines, to sponsor various types of research and projects, and to improve public welfare.

This is what we intend to achieve from a high level, all our activities focus around it. Renaissance Tech, the stock market hedge fund has been supporting 1/3 of scientific grants over the last few years. That’s a noble act and we will seek to do that or even better in the long run.

Are your token and smart contracts safe?

CertiK, a renowned auditor thoroughly reviewed our code base, and concluded in their report that ‘we believe this smart contracts pass security qualification to be listed on digital asset exchanges’. They conducted over 200 audits, reviewed the code for major crypto entities like Binance Labs, NEO and ONTology, and have secured over 5 billion USD assets on blockchain.

What is the primary use case of COMM token in the Crypto Commonwealth ecosystem? And how will it be helpful for long term investors?

COMM is a payment system suited for any generic purchase, and the currency of our ecosystem as a vehicle of consensus that endows exploration of new knowledge with value.

On top of that, COMM represents the right to invest $1 equivalent asset in certain strategies of ours, and as our strategy becomes renowned and popular, so does the right to invest. Also, COMM is the right to subscribe to our publication and journal, initially at a discount and eventually exclusively. We are dedicated to expanding the use cases and growing our ecosystem.

We will have our own mainnet and support text or file storage too. In the future, all issuance of new strategies, standalone and copyrighted materials such as books and publications will be based on the COMM mainnet.

How does COMM maintain the security of the feature/function so that it can get the trust of investors?

The tokens are either locked (the team’s reserve) by audited smart contracts or stored in top, secured wallets. The token is as safe as ETH, and for the mainnet we will collaborate or seek highly experienced teams & developers for assistance

What is the Economic model of the COMM token, and how will its architecture ensure scarcity of the token and raise its value?

Our total supply is 1 billion, 20% of team reserve is locked for 5 years and to be released linearly, 30% with the foundation and 50% for the investors in tiered sales. We are considering locking more tokens. And as we grow more use cases as outlined above, COMM will be highly sought in our ecosystem and become widely applicable. See our whitepaper for more designs.

Will COMM have sub-projects other than the main project? How?

Many. We will invite portfolio managers to host their strategies with us. And we already have a few good strategies across global instruments (such as the stock market) to tokenize. On the publishing end, I may publish 1-2 books with the COMM ecosystem, and we will invite excellent authors to publish their books or preprints, raise initial funds and prepare for massive dissemination.

Publishing on blockchain offers direct funding without middlemen, so that the community and the author both benefit more from the structure. A certain percentage of copyright income would be dedicated to the sub-token systems. This will be an important use case for the COMM system and the mainnet.

All these sub-projects will be based on ERC tokens initially (if issued early) and migrated to our mainnet eventually. The COMM ecosystem will support issuance of new tokens, fundraise for and incubate the best of them for commercialization. Currently, the fundraising infrastructure support for our sub-projects has a high priority and may commence way before our mainnet launch.

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