Aluna’s vision is to gamify finance and create a seamless social trading experience for a Web 3.0 world.
This is a story of how it all began.
How it Started
Alvin started trading cryptocurrencies in 2013, and visited Twitter frequently to follow what other traders were saying about the market. However, he soon realised it was impossible to know if a crypto trader on social media was putting his money where his mouth is.
On the other side of the world, Henrique switched from trading stocks to crypto in 2014, and spent countless hours building and backtesting algorithmic trading strategies for Bitcoin. He was not satisfied with the suite of existing crypto trading tools which were siloed individually and cumbersome to use separately.
Fast forward to 2017. Alvin worked with a pine script developer (shout out to Scott) to build his first trading indicator, and was looking for a way to automate those strategies. He was introduced to Henrique, who had already built a multi-exchange trading terminal for his own use, and a bot which enabled him to execute trades directly from Telegram.
Alvin and Henrique hit it off right away, and discussed combining a social network with a trading terminal to create a transparent environment where traders can learn from one another, thrive and unleash their full potential.
Soon after, Aluna.Social was born.
MVP Release
Alvin and Henrique quickly got started on the MVP, and on-boarded Filipe to help with the frontend. In December 2017, we released an MVP of the platform to 300 early adopters.
The MVP featured an API trading terminal connected with 3 exchanges, Bittrex, Poloniex, and 1Broker. All traders on the platform had a public profile showing their unforgeable trading history.
Alpha Release
After reflecting on the feedback from our early adopters, we went back to the drawing board to design a new version of the Aluna.Social platform.
In July 2018, we on-boarded Anderson, our CTO, and Alex, our product designer, to start working on the new version of Aluna that you see today. Our core team of 5 members have been working together on Aluna for the last 2–3 years, while some have previously worked together on multiple projects over the past 15 years.
We continued to work hard through the depths of the bear market, and released a private Alpha in December 2018, that was integrated with Bitfinex, Bittrex and Poloniex.
Beta Release
Working on feedback from the Alpha, we refactored a significant portion of the code, went through a major server migration to improve the architecture, and completed penetration testing before releasing a public beta in October 2019 that also included Binance integration.
More recently, we released copy-trading and counter-copy-trading in April 2020, BitMEX integration in July 2020, and plan to launch PRO subscriptions in Q2 2021.
How it’s Going
Notably, our UI design has changed significantly since the MVP, but beyond the surface, we had to overcome countless challenges to get the platform to where it is today. Between exchange API rate limits, normalising data across different exchanges, and scaling to accommodate thousands of users; we now have a robust infrastructure that will allow us to easily integrate more exchanges and roll out new and exciting features.
We have successfully concluded the private fundraising round, and will be introducing our strategic investors, partners and advisors in the coming weeks.
“I Prod In Test”
There’s a lot on the line when it comes to security at Aluna.Social and handling our users’ exchange API keys is a huge responsibility. As a result, we take a rigorous approach towards our testing process and security standards.
We conducted the first penetration test before our platform’s Beta release, and are currently in the process of migrating to Google Cloud for greater security, stability and scalability, and conducting another security audit on our trading terminal.
When it comes to smart contracts, we don’t believe in risking millions of dollars on untested and unaudited code, and always make sure everything is going as expected in a test-net environment before releasing to production.
We are currently getting the ALN smart contracts audited by CertiK, before deploying the vesting, liquidity mining, and governance contracts and putting money on the line.
What’s Next?
We plan to start our ALN Public Sale in March 2021, and list ALN on several centralised and decentralised exchanges after the end of the sale.
After listing, various campaigns will kick off where participants can earn ALN, such as via liquidity mining or trading competitions on Aluna.Social.
As we get closer to the public release of the Aluna.Social platform, along with the upcoming public sale, we will be ramping up our marketing efforts to reach out to a larger audience. To that end, we recently on-boarded Kate as Head of Marketing at Aluna, and you can expect to see various marketing campaigns kicking off this month.
With Bitcoin’s 4th major bull run knocking at our doorstep, we’re excited and more ready than ever to bring Aluna.Social to a brand new community of aspiring retail traders who — just like we did when we first started learning about crypto — will be looking for a guide and the tools to help them navigate the crypto markets and become a successful crypto trader.
Official Links
Smart Contracts: https://github.com/alunacrypto/aluna-smart-contracts
ERC-20 Token Address: 0x8185bc4757572da2a610f887561c32298f1a5748
Whitepaper: https://aluna.social/WP.pdf
Trading Platform: https://aluna.social/platform-overview
Token Website: https://aluna.social/token
Twitter: https://twitter.com/alunasocial
Discord: https://discord.gg/hsadykv
Telegram (TPG): https://telegram.me/collablandbot?start=rect5gvuLQcguSzdT_-tpc
