Interview With Cointrend Founder Nick Lucas

Cointrend is a website that tracks news and sentiment related to major cryptocurrencies. Observing the site, it’s easy to spot general sentiment, good or bad, about any particular major cryptocurrency that an investor might be interested in. I recently caught up with its founder, Nick Lucas, for a quick interview.

Heidi: What would an elevator pitch for Coin Trend sound like?

Nick Lucas: So, basically, what Coin Trend really helps with is as an investor, you have a lot of different media to pay attention to to know what is actually important as far as topics that are actually price impacting and it’s also very difficult to keep up with so many different Reddit threads, understanding if a certain coin is having some kind of happenings going on with it.

So, what Coin Trend does is really help you aggregate all this together and really show you what topics are actually impacting and then also keeping an eye out for big shifts of mentions. This way you don’t have to go through endless articles, endless Reddit threads and sift through all that.

And then also being aware of when there is a big change of sentiment or mentions, that you’re on the pulse of that, allowing you to make decisions and be attentive to any issues that come up from there.

Heidi: Right. So why do you think it’s important for people to be able to quickly track public sentiment about top cryptocurrencies?

Nick Lucas: Yeah, sure. As a trader, when one coin peaks, you need to know what will be next. Basically a lot of traders have different bots that look at the supply volumes and that sort of thing that give them indications of peaking. So, they need to know what coin is going to be falling or what coin is gaining a lot of traction to shift say money from Bitcoin into Ethereum or Monero, or what not.

So if there is a flair of sentiment in another coin, it’s a good sign something is developing and to take a deeper look. Then the other point is, it’s also good to know something is dramatically happening in your own coin that you’re holding, especially if it’s a highly popular coin such as Bitcoin where media drives so much of that volatility.

With like say, I think it was about a month ago, like one of the major news TV channels had a show about cryptocurrency and that created a huge amount of interest and drove price because it created a small price drop in major coins where people are so driven by media. So, it’s a good tool to have for coins that do have a huge impact on media because with novice investors, they make so much of their decisions on just what other influential people say.

Heidi: What kind of feedback have you gotten for your beta version?

Nick Lucas: One of the big things is actually the leaderboard. There’s a lot of returning users on that. A lot of people are wanting to stay on the pulse and it’s actually been effective being able to see the shifts of block to being mentioned. Basically the frequency of change percentage that you see on our leaderboard kind of really gives you an indication over the last 24 hours how mentions have shifted, kind of giving you a really good insight of okay, I need to start paying attention to this coin.

We also started a beta release of notifications notifying you that certain things are happing within coins of changes of mentions and also sentiment. So a lot of users have been taking advantage—been really using that for the most part.

Then as far as our topic trends features, as far as analyzing the topics that are going on during certain periods, that is—right now, because it’s a lot of data to still ingest, so basically users are able to also find—basically you have to really sift through to find some topics in there that have history of trends, but users are finding value in that still because they’re really able to correlate specific trends with the history of price when those topics are mentioned, what the price was during that time.

But the downside is, it is a lot of work that you still have to do as a user to find those trends, which kind of goes into the next question that I was going to talk on with—do you have plans for the plans of better features? One thing that we’re working on next is making these more predictive. So, picking out for the users what topics to actually pay attention to. Because right now you have to—I don’t know if you’ve played around much with the bubble charts where it shows all the topics, but right now you have to really click through, then compare the history with the price. So, basically, what we’re getting to is basically having our machine learning algorithm run through all these topics and pick out the topics that do have the correlations with volatilities. That’s where we want to get to with that and create those notifications if that topic is—a topic that’s related to a category that has those changes a price in the path to then notify the user.

An example of that would be anything that’s government related when there’s a new security law or government law or what not, a thing put in place that then you’ll be notified as soon as there’s some kind of talk or mentions about it.

Heidi: Since you already did do the features you plan to add so that’s about all I have. Anything you’d like to add?

Nick Lucas: No, that’s about it. Do you trade at all?

Heidi: Not much, but I have checked out Coin Trade and it looks pretty cool.

Nick Lucas: Thank you. Thank you. Awesome. Yeah, let me know if you ever have any more questions and be happy to answer.

Heidi: Thanks.