Exclusive Interview: Calif Raheman, Autonio Founder, on Revolutionizing DeFi with Algorithmic Trading

I inherited a passion for knowledge, medicine, innovation, and creative thinking. This inspired me to begin my entrepreneurial journey quite early. 

I already have several successful ventures under my belt, but also some failures that provided me with valuable experience.

I'm a medical professional but had my first technology patent at 17. Having bootstrapped my businesses, I worked in practically every role and department within an organization gaining experience and expertise.

I started my crypto journey in 2014 as a peer-to-peer lender and trader. When I understood the potential impact blockchain could have on the very fabric of society, of how we transact, interact, govern, I was hooked. Since then along with my mentors and peers, I've been working on various solutions and use-cases for blockchain. Over the years our team has had the privilege of developing various decentralized solutions for businesses including public companies.  

Autonio is an early-stage decentralized autonomous organization built around developing accessible and user-friendly trading tools and infrastructure for the DeFi space as a whole. We aim to achieve this by democratizing access to trading tools that, until now, weren't easily accessible for traders.  

The NIOX Platform is the foundational toolset that includes several products like NIOX Suite, Liquidity, Smartdex, and AI. The toolset we're building in some ways can be compared to a Linux inspired open-source plug-n-play techstack for businesses, developers ultimately optimized for the end-user i.e. traders, investors.

For example, NIOX Suite and NIOX Liquidity – an automated trading terminal and liquidity mining protocol enable efficient crowdsourcing of liquidity. Users can deploy market-making bots across integrated exchanges. As part of our partnership with SingularityNET, we're actively working on AI deployment which aims to enhance trading performances for our users, leading to active and sustainable crowdsourced liquidity.

Additionally, Smartdex is a multi-chain DEX featuring an order book system powered by 0x protocol along with an on-chain market maker. Early iterations are inspired by Uniswap's AMM model, however, we're introducing our own on-chain market-making solution called the Active Market Maker or the IMM. The DEX is currently live on Polygon (Matic) and will have support for Ethereum, BSC, and Cardano.

The NIOX token, as the lifeblood of the NIOX ecosystem, is used to purchase access to the trading toolset on a Pay to Use basis, providing simple opt-in/opt-out and a personalized usage model, with minimum entry barriers. 

It serves as a governance token, enabling DAO members to participate in the decision-making process to further improve the project while receiving staking rewards for taking part in the governance. DAO members also benefit from reduced trading fees on the Smartdex.

Honestly, being an inconsistent and often emotional trader is what prompted us to build an automated trading platform for ourselves. But in the process of building this solution along with philosophical influences of the idea and power of decentralization, the promise of financial freedom, our vision of Autonio was born.

Our vision is to build a thriving community around algorithmic trading and we intend to do that by democratizing access to sophisticated trading tools and infrastructure. Our goal is to enable users to navigate the crypto space with profit, privacy, and ease, while our technology also serves other ecosystem participants like exchanges, token projects, and businesses. 

AI and Machine Learning are an essential component of our solution. Traditionally AI tools have been inaccessible to the general public, and with SingularityNET's decentralized AI platform we're breaking that barrier to entry, enabling all users to apply the power and potential that comes with AI.

We're developing a framework that will serve as a building block for businesses and developers to train and deploy AI agents and services focused on enhancing automated trading performance. 

Traders will have the ability to combine various AI agents and portfolio management strategies to enhance their trading performance.

Our advantage may be that it is quite simple to use our tools and participate in our ecosystem. That way we are democratizing access to sophisticated trading tools and connecting liquidity buyers and sellers enables sustainable crowdsourced liquidity.

The great thing about all this is, that token projects and exchanges benefit from crowdsourced liquidity while our users have incentives to provide liquidity creating a virtuous cycle, enabling us to be collaborative driving value for the ecosystem. 

Let's first look at liquidity, market making, and its importance. Liquidity is one of the most critical requirements for all digital assets and trading venues. Market participants are unclear as to what drives liquidity and how to measure its effects because market making, the practice of providing liquidity, has traditionally been accessible to only a limited number of participants. Hummingbot published a paper that said crypto exchanges and token issuers pay an estimated 1.2 billion dollars every year compensating market makers, like quantitative hedge funds that trade in crypto assets, in the form of rebates, fees, and the opportunity cost of capital.

Liquidity has long been a central concern, not only for cryptocurrency and blockchain projects but for financial markets in general. It is a prerequisite for the growth of a project, financially and otherwise. Efforts have been made to solve the liquidity problem by providing it from some centralized or centralized source. But this conflicts with the decentralization ethos itself of the DeFi economy.

A token-incentivized approach to market making can encourage consistent crowdsourced liquidity provisions. With the right incentive structure and protocol to enable seamless matching between liquidity buyers (exchanges, tokens) and liquidity sellers (the community) we can effectively crowdsource liquidity. NIOX Liquidity; our liquidity mining protocol and NIOX Suite – Automated trading tool are designed to enable crowdsourced liquidity. 

When liquidity is truly crowdsourced from a diverse audience whose behavior and interests are uncorrelated, liquidity is essentially more robust. It is less likely to disappear in a crisis and more representative of a healthy market.

This space transforms more and more toward wider adoption. Crypto as an asset class seems to be maturing, without losing its innovative edge. And more and more use cases will be found, beyond the pure trading and staking aspects. And given the rapid pace the entire crypto ecosystem is moving, a lot of exciting developments can be expected pretty soon.

This hype and renewed interest in DeFi and crypto might slow down, but solid solutions and teams will survive.

We see a lot of tribalism in this space. Lots of communities fight with each other about what the best protocol or chain is. But it is becoming more and more irrelevant since we already see a rise of cross-chain solutions, where applications leverage certain aspects of certain protocols, while ideally, the end-user won't even notice.