Nuant: the first unified platform for digital asset management, analytics and intelligence

Published on:
November 7, 2022
Reading time:
6 minutes

Nuant highlights at a glance:

  • Single UI for portfolio management, regardless of where the portfolio assets are held
  • Integrated on-chain and market data services 
  • Purpose-built query engine for analyzing on-chain data and creating actionable insights
  • Specialized network, token and wallet intelligence tools with automated risk alerts

Nuant is a specialized portfolio monitoring, analytics and data intelligence platform tailored to the needs of digital asset managers, crypto analysts and data scientists. Through one clean and intuitive user interface, it provides tools to manage a digital asset portfolio, analyze its performance, identify market opportunities, manage risks and perform due diligence on wallets and tokens. In a fast-paced and often incohesive market, Nuant provides an integrated data and intelligence hub, allowing you to uncover unseen opportunities and manage funds and client  mandates with confidence. 

A global dashboard for digital asset management 

For digital asset funds, the decentralization of crypto assets is a double-edged sword. On one side of the ledger, the benefits of decentralization — including security, transparency, and efficiency gains — are a central pillar of the long-term investment case for crypto as an asset class. On the other hand, however, the fragmentation of the market gives rise to numerous operational challenges for digital asset portfolio managers.

It is considered best practice for digital assets to be traded via a myriad of exchanges, brokers, OTC desks and DeFi platforms globally in order to achieve best price execution whilst at the same time, reducing counterparty risk. This results in a highly-fragmented and frustrating landscape for professional investors where the assets of a portfolio are held across multiple centralised exchanges, on-chain wallets and custodial solutions.

Up until now. this has resulted in digital asset funds having to view their asset holdings through multiple UI’s of the exchanges, wallets and custody solutions and attempting to co-mingle these assets using tools like MS Excel or something similar but always self-built and maintained by the fund to try and get a single real-time view of the mark-to-market of the portfolio. This is before even having to try to derive portfolio and asset-level insights and analytics in combination with subscribing to multiple on-chain data analysis services, all in the name of managing risk and compliance, finding opportunities and driving alpha.

In a digital asset market characterized by fragmentation, Nuant provides clarity. It seamlessly integrates with cryptocurrency wallets, custody solutions, and exchange accounts to produce a unified, global dashboard view that provides a clear, concise and consistent view of combined holdings in one place, in real time, regardless of where the underlying assets are stored. This is made possible by seamlessly integrating Nuant’s own proprietary on-chain data and insights service with leading third-party market data, giving that always-on total view of all factors affecting the performance of a fund.

Nuant allows you to select your preferred on-chain and market data metrics and analytics required to manage the portfolio and the market, allowing you to monitor and visualize them according to your preferences and needs. This is achieved by creating a series of customized dashboards to optimize, automate and manage your daily portfolio management, research and decision-support tasks. You can use a predefined template to get up and running quickly, or construct your own dashboard using Nuant's widget manager.

Diving a little deeper, a portfolio manager for example can view and analyze their crypto holdings through dynamically generated real-time portfolio views based on multiple criteria. This enables breaking down a portfolio based on aggregations such as asset, asset class, wallet, on-exchange vs off-exchange exposure, sector, trading volume and market cap to name just a few, to accurately understand and monitor where both risks and opportunities lie.        

A unified view of both on-chain and off-chain signals, metrics and intelligence

Fragmentation not only affects the portfolio manager, it also has implications for analysts seeking to gain intelligence about the market. Whereas up until recently, most professional investors and institutions relied on market data from off-chain sources to conduct their research, the development of more sophisticated on-chain metrics is rapidly changing the picture to give new and unseen insights into the potential risks and upsides in the market.

For digital assets like Bitcoin and many others, monetary supply is hard-coded into its underlying protocol. Ultimately, buyer and seller behavior on on-chain venues such as decentralized exchanges (DEXs) will spillover and affect asset values on centralized venues too. In addition, analysis of certain on-chain metrics, like the market-value-to-realized-value ratio (MVRV) for instance, can produce insights that cannot be derived from market data alone.

Thus, to get a full and unbiased picture of the market, analysts need to have an integrated view of signals, metrics and intelligence from both on-chain and market sources, combined, in one place, in one experience. Nuant includes its built-in insights service and query engine for on-chain data, coupled with an extensive array of market data from off-chain sources. Our unified Data Explorer combines both to provide industry-wide visibility across the entire digital asset sector.       

Simpler, faster, custom analytics and model development

Standard digital asset metrics like total active addresses and transaction volumes may be useful to establish a long-term rationale for investing in a particular digital asset. However, portfolio managers  also need access to bespoke metrics and graphics  to gain an edge over their competitors, uncover price inefficiencies, and ultimately generate alpha. Existing digital asset management software allows custom queries to be generated using scripting languages like SQL, but this tends to be a difficult  and time-consuming task leading to data and operational risk issues. In addition, when building and backtesting custom models, data often needs to be exported from multiple sources via Excel sheets or CSV files and then reintegrated into third-party platforms or development environments.

Nuant has created a new domain-specific language, Nuant Query Language (NQL) that greatly reduces the time and code required to create and execute custom queries. Furthermore, you can research, build, prototype and backtest custom models within one integrated environment.   

Streamlined risk management & compliance

The digital asset market is coming under increasing regulatory scrutiny in countries and jurisdictions throughout the globe. In addition to existing international guidance like the FATF travel rule, a number of new regulations will come on stream in the coming years including the Markets in Crypto-assets (MiCA) directive across the EU in 2024. While not yet as far advanced, the US government also published a framework on regulating digital assets in September 2022. While these new rules will provide welcome regulatory clarity for the digital asset sector and will likely increase institutional engagement in the asset class, they also pose compliance challenges for cryptocurrency funds.

Nuant's integrated wallet and token intelligence tools allows a fund to efficiently check the provenance and risk profile of both an asset as well as a wallet which greatly helps understand whether a series of asset holdings can be accepted as part of a new client KYC on-boarding process. Proprietary Nuant technologies enable you to detect high-risk transaction or activity patterns that tend to correlate with fraudulent behavior. In addition, active alerts can be set up which will constantly monitor all supported digital assets and notify you of changes to the risk profile of your holdings in relation to internal compliance or external client mandate rules.

Conclusion

Due to the fragmentation of the digital asset market, investment professionals in the sector often need to rely on a series of APIs, Excel sheets, and inefficient manual processes to integrate data which greatly increases risks such as operational, data and decision risk. Nuant provides a unified service to assess digital asset performance, glean actionable intelligence, and drive informed data-driven decisions. The platform will launch publicly in Q4 this year. To register your interest in trialing Nuant for your fund or portfolio, please complete  the form here and for more information, visit nuant.com.

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