Our Users Own Their Data

Covey is Launching MetaMask Support

In the ’90s the internet gave anyone with a decent connection the ability to read anything they wanted. Existing news sources were now accessible to everyone. Soon after in 2005, new tech emerged giving anyone the ability to read AND write. We saw the explosion of Youtube, Twitter, and Instagram. Today, we are seeing another massive shift. We now have the ability to read, write, AND own our data. Anyone with an ethereum wallet can now own a public and immutable investing track record.

“The future has already arrived, it’s just not evenly distributed.” — William Gibson

In the last couple years MetaMask has gone from less than 1 million users to 21 millions users. The explosion in growth is because MetaMask gives anyone the ability to interact with blockchain apps and retain ownership of their assets or data.

Give Analysts a Chance To Become a Manager

For Covey Analysts, owning their data is important because an immutable public investing track record gives you access to monetization options. A track record can be used to get a job at an existing manager, launch a fund, or in Covey’s case, earn crypto rewards.

While Retaining Ownership of Their Data

Owning a public auditable track record is rare in the world of investing because it costs $100k-$300k to launch a fund with auditors. Fund managers who crossed over the high barriers to entry, by launching a fund, are the few who have track records. If you don’t have the start up money to launch a fund, you rely on track records from brokerages, which are packed with personal data and generally hard to share with potential investors.

Building a track record underneath an existing Manager is another source, but those are owned by the Manager and cannot be shared with anyone else. I was an analyst at Citadel, and after leaving I left my track record behind, unable to share with future investors or employers.

Use MetaMask To Own Your Track Record

To get started, head to covey.io, hit “Create Portfolio”, enter in your email, and click connect “Connect MetaMask”.

Once you connect MetaMask, pick one address to use going forward. This will be the address that your track record lives on. Be careful when picking addresses — your track record will live here.

Next up, choose your network: SKALE or Polygon. We tend to prefer SKALE because it is free for our users and faster, but we understand Polygon is popular so we offer support for both. You can switch between networks if you want to later on. For Polygon, you will need about $0.20 of MATIC to pay transaction costs for posting 100 trades. With either SKALE or Polygon the price is far cheaper than paying $100k+ for a public and auditable track record.

For our existing users, you will be prompted to connect MetaMask next time you log in. Your existing track record will automatically be exported to the new address.

Placing a Trade

When a new trade is placed, you are posting that idea data to a public smart contract, where your track record will live forever. All that is required is one extra confirmation click in MetaMask:

Everything is loaded for you. Simply click confirm in MetaMask, and the trade will hit on chain.

Watch Out For…

We are super excited to be one of the first platforms to give our users ownership of their data. We can’t forget that this is new tech, so there are some pain points still. Posting trades on Mobile sucks. To do this you need to download the MetaMask app, copy your private key to the app, and access covey.io through the browser in the MetaMask app. We are comfortable with this issue because two thirds of our usage is on desktop. Tech has a habit of changing, and we hope this problem will be solved soon.