Numerai Kicks Off Strategic NMR Buyback

With over $400M in AUM and 1M NMR staked daily, Numerai buys back the token that powers its hedge fund.

Numerai created one of the first crypto-tokens in 2017 when it launched Numeraire (NMR). NMR was early in the world of blockchain. You could stake NMR on Numerai long before Ethereum introduced proof of stake. Numerai pioneered a brand new use case for staking: let data scientists stake cryptocurrency on their machine learning models.

This idea—staking models with skin in the game—would go on to transform Numerai’s hedge fund.

Solving the Hardest Problem in Finance

Numerai’s mission is to build the world’s last hedge fund using crowdsourced artificial intelligence. But there’s a challenge: how do you get thousands of anonymous data scientists around the world to submit models you can trust enough to trade in a real hedge fund?

Before NMR, there was no good solution. But with staking, Numerai created an elegant mechanism: if a model performs well on real, future stock market data, it earns NMR. If it performs poorly, it loses NMR.

This system aligns every participant with the long-term success of the hedge fund. It rewards models that are truly predictive—not just overfit to past data. It creates a global, decentralized collective of data scientists all working on the same problem: building models that consistently work out of sample.

Growth in Staking And Assets

In the early days of our staking feature, just a few thousand NMR was staked on Numerai. Today, over 1 million NMR is staked on Numerai models daily. The evidence for the success of NMR staking is obvious to anyone watching the performance of Numerai’s Stake Weighted Meta Model which combines all signals based on their stakes. Over the past year, there is not a single model on Numerai which has performed better than the stake-weighted average of all models. This highlights both the value of NMR to Numerai and the core premise of Numerai: that combining a diverse collection of machine learning models built by the most talented data scientists around the world is simply the best.

As Numerai has grown and been refined, institutional quant investors have taken notice. Numerai’s assets have more than doubled in the past year alone growing from $173 million one year ago to $441 million today. Investors today include university endowments and some of the top quant allocators in the world. Numerai now trades over $1 billion per month across more than 30 global markets.

NMR Supply Constraint

We don’t believe there is any limit to what can be achieved with decentralized artificial intelligence as applied to quantitative finance in the 21st century. But one thing is limited: NMR itself. NMR is a fixed supply token capped at 11 million NMR. Numerai cannot create more NMR even if we wanted to. Because Numerai pays data scientists with NMR from our treasury, we are running out of NMR. Approximately 3 million NMR remain in our treasury—and once it's gone, we won’t be able to support staking and payouts, both of which are essential to Numerai’s hedge fund.

The Buyback

So today, we are announcing that Numerai is buying back $1m in NMR on the open market.

We want to do this purchase as transparently as possible. We spoke with the team at Coinbase Institutional and they are going to help facilitate this purchase. We don’t want our purchase to disrupt the market for NMR in any way so Coinbase will make orders for us at or near the bid price. This means the purchase may take some time to complete.

Why This Matters

Numerai has proven that you can align thousands of independent minds to solve the hardest problem in finance. But that alignment depends on NMR.

As we enter our next phase of growth, NMR remains essential. It fuels the incentive system, it filters for real performance, and keeps Numerai’s Stake Weighted Meta Model, the top model on Numerai.

If you're new to Numerai & NMR, now is the time to watch closely:
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Past performance is not indicative of future results.  This content does not represent an offer to purchase or sell any security or the interests of any account managed by Numerai GP, LLC or its affiliates  Such an ofter may only be made to persons who qualify to invest and in jurisdictions in which such an offer is legal.