Original author: Zen, PANews

Quantrend Technology is a company specializing in AI cryptocurrency quantitative trading. It was established in 2020. In just three years, it has become the top three in global contract trading volume for Bitcoin and Ethereum, and 10% of Binance's global contract trading volume. Its high-frequency trading system has an annual trading volume of US$300 billion. Although none of the three founders have a background in the traditional financial industry, through their hard work and concerted efforts, they have finally brought Quantrend to the world-class stage.

Different paths to the same destination: the story of Quantrend’s core “iron triangle”

Quantrend's founder, Chen Taiyuan, is known as a "genius" on the Taiwanese Internet. He skipped grades and started his own business while still in school. He founded his first company at the age of 19 and obtained a master's degree in telecommunications engineering from the National Taiwan University at the age of 22. As a serial entrepreneur, Chen Taiyuan has developed dating apps such as Lianlian Xiaozhan and If You Are the One. In 2015, he co-founded 17 Live with "Big Brother" Huang Licheng and became popular. The live streaming app has grown rapidly since its launch, with tens of millions of downloads in just eight months.

However, just when 17 Live was at its peak, Chen Taiyuan chose to leave in 2016 and began to devote all his energy to the blockchain and cryptocurrency industry. In August of the following year, Chen Taiyuan co-founded Cobinhood, the world's first zero-fee crypto exchange, and set a new record for 1CO in Taiwan at the time. In addition, they also launched DEXON, Taiwan's first self-developed high-speed underlying public chain platform, in 2019, with a transmission rate of 12,000 per second (TPS).

Shortly after DEXON was launched, the company's top management split due to differences in ideas and management rights. Chen Taiyuan was caught in the storm, and only Xu Jingteng was willing to stand by him, help him sort out the situation and share the troubles. Xu Jingteng is the core figure of the American anti-aging direct sales brand NU SKIN. Because Chen Taiyuan briefly joined the brand in college, the two met and formed a long-term friendship. At that time, the two had no business dealings, and Jingteng, as a "super salesman", did not know much about cryptocurrency.

After completing the relevant follow-up work and finally getting through the darkest moment of the Cobinhood incident, Chen Taiyuan found Xu Jingteng and invited him to be the co-founder of Quantrend. "This (Quantrend) is a really good project that can help customers grow their assets, help exchanges provide deep liquidity, and help the industry become stable in all aspects, rather than just speculating on coins and projects to get attention." Xu Jingteng said that out of ideological agreement, he eventually joined Quantrend and served as general manager. With his rich business experience, Jingteng provides support for the company's business development, organizational management and other work.

But if they want to create world-class products, it is not enough for Chen Taiyuan to be responsible for the technical aspects alone. They also need an expert who can be recognized by him and can discuss technical issues together. Finally, they found Dai Zhiyang, the most famous online forum in Taiwan. Co-founder of PTT. Dai Zhiyang has been exploring the front-end of the technology industry since he was in college when Taiwan was just starting to have the Internet. Therefore, after initially founding an online forum, he also participated in the music streaming platform KKBOX and e-commerce electronic payment and other fields.

Dai Zhiyang started mining in 2012 and became exposed to cryptocurrency and blockchain. He believes that blockchain is the next decisive revolution of the Internet, which will completely subvert the entire world, and may even overthrow the so-called country, and even future business. Since 2018 and 19, he has been promoting the entire blockchain industry and promoting various chains and coins. Around the end of 2020, when he encountered some bottlenecks, Chen Taiyuan found him. After a week of brief contact and communication, he decided to invest in this field and served as chief technology officer at Quantrend. Dai Zhiyang said that Xu Jingteng played the most critical role in his decision-making process. The core team of the Iron Triangle was thus formed.

Chen Taiyuan proposed ideas and strategies; Dai Zhiyang was responsible for implementing them with technology; Xu Jingteng focused on company operations and business development. Dai Zhiyang said: "The relationship between the three of us is complementary and smooth."

A series of twists and turns: From scratch to becoming a global top 10 high-frequency trader

Similar to traditional financial market makers, the operation mode of crypto market makers is mainly to provide liquidity and market depth for the cryptocurrency market and make profits in the process. Therefore, people often hear about companies such as Jump Trading and Wintermute. They are either quantitative trading companies involved in stocks, futures, foreign exchange and other businesses around the world, or their core personnel come from traditional financial institutions with strong technical and financial backgrounds. Crypto market making business is a piece of cake for them. Quantrend is completely different. Its core founders have no experience in the financial industry. It must be quite difficult for them to make a name for themselves.

Quantrend, which was founded during the COVID-19 pandemic, has made many technical adjustments to its strategy. Quantitative trading requires processing massive amounts of information and data. Chen Taiyuan and Dai Zhiyang's team initially used Python to handle it, but soon discovered that its performance was obviously insufficient. After trying Go, it still could not meet the expected standards. In the end, they chose Rust, an unpopular but efficient language. The process of technological transformation sounds simple, but it is actually full of difficulties. Dai Zhiyang, who is responsible for system construction, said: "It may take 1 to 2 years for a general team to change the programming language to write a product. We only need a few months, and we can continue to evolve." The price is that everyone is often locked in a small room for seven or eight hours at a time.

Quantrend is like an APP built on a trading platform, providing value-added services to institutional or VIP users, while also providing liquidity and trading volume for exchanges. Chen Taiyuan said in an interview with PANews, "We are still more focused on maintaining market order and stability, and then developing our AI technology, starting from the root."

In the fall of 2021, Quantrend completed the architecture of the high-frequency trading system, trained a predictive AI model, and obtained the highest level of VIP on the FTX exchange. After everything was ready, high-frequency trading was officially launched, which should have been an important milestone. However, within a few days, the net value, which had been rising sharply, began to flip and plummet at a certain point in time. After readjusting the parameters and listing it again, it turned from rising sharply to falling sharply again in just a few hours. Quantrend began to suspect that things were not simple and began to experiment, and the results pointed to the same conclusion: FTX cheated. A month later, Quantrend finally had to make a bold move, sell all FTT, remove all strategies, and start everything over again.

In July 2022, it took another half a year before trading resumed on Binance. However, at this time, the crypto market had already entered a cold winter, and all practitioners began to wait for the bull market, but they waited for the FTX explosion first. Quantrend was able to survive this storm because it transferred its assets early after discovering that FTX was tricky.

After "switching" to the Binance platform, Quantrend has been developing steadily for more than a year. From the perspective of Binance's perpetual contracts, Quantrend has basically ranked among the top ten traders in the world, and its XAOS trading system generates a trading volume of up to 300 billion US dollars a year. At the beginning of this year, Quantrend also won the highest market maker level and VIP level on OKX. It can be said that regardless of the market conditions, its high-frequency trading system has been verified and fully recognized by the market.

As a start-up, Quantrend also provides asset management services, such as the Managed Sub-Account (MSA) service that Binance VIP 3 and above users can enjoy. The managed sub-account is an asset management service framework that allows investors to entrust transactions to professional trading teams while maintaining account application flexibility. While enjoying the same preferential VIP rates as the trading team, it can also ensure the security of funds. It has flexible operating characteristics, which can not only meet the needs of investors to differentiate their accounts, but also support investors to create multiple managed sub-accounts for different trading teams to use, so as to better adapt to the diversified asset management market needs.

Looking to the future: Seeking cooperation with big capital

At present, Quantrend has basically all the necessary capabilities in terms of trading volume, strategy, system, and relationship and cooperation with exchanges. With the expectation of a bull market, a positive market also means a need for larger capital volume. As a high-frequency trader ranked near the top ten in the world, Quantrend will seek to cooperate with international capital this year to expand its overall trading volume.

As for its asset management services, Quantrend will further highlight its uniqueness and differentiation in the market, including using custody sub-accounts as value-added services, or seeking cooperation with traditional investment banks. "Through the custody services of these banks, we will let the banks guarantee the safety of customers' funds, and then provide them with some relatively safe and high-yield products. I think this is what we will do this year."

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