Washington, D.C. — The Commodity Futures Trading Commission today announced Nakamoto Terminal (NTerminal), a data platform developer based in Washington, D.C., as the winner of Project Streetlamp, the CFTC’s first competition under the Science Prize Competition Act of 2015. As part of the competition, NTerminal also received the CFTC’s first Innovator of the Year award in recognition of its successful submission. Both announcements were made during today’s Empower Innovation 2020 virtual session.

“The CFTC is pleased to recognize NTerminal as our first Innovator of the Year”,” said LabCFTC Director and Chief Innovation Officer Melissa Netram. “Their development of an AI tool that automates the identification process of unregistered foreign entities not only helps the Commission but also will ultimately help investors make more informed decisions.” 

“Prize competitions like Project Streetlamp can be a useful tool to support responsible innovation,” added LabCFTC Senior Counsel Brian Trackman, who led this effort. “It’s great to see the success of this inaugural contest.”

Administered by LabCFTC, Project Streetlamp challenged innovators to leverage AI and other technologies to automate the process of identifying and adding unregistered foreign entities offering services requiring CFTC registration to the CFTC’s Registration Deficient (RED) List. The RED List was developed in 2015 to help customers make more informed decisions about whether to trade with or through such entities. 

NTerminal successfully developed a tool that automatically creates a list of entities to add to the RED list. The tool’s architecture is based on the CFTC’s criteria and automates searching for an entity’s metadata. The metadata is collected by NTerminal’s data aggregation platform. The tool also is capable of distinguishing between companies that should be placed on the RED list and those that should not.

About Nakamoto Terminal

Nakamoto Terminal offers a suite of digital asset data analytics products built by Inca Digital, an open-source intelligence company founded by former INTERPOL analysts. Its natural language processing module leverages neural networks to track individuals and companies, parse global regulatory actions, and monitor traditional and social media, as well as the darknet. Interlinking it with other Inca products enables a wide range of surveillance and intelligence use cases, from attributing large movements of funds on blockchain countering threat finance in great power competition for the Department of Defense. The CFTC currently uses NTerminal for market surveillance, investigations, and litigation support through real time analysis of digital asset financial, technical, blockchain, and natural language data.

About LabCFTC

In service to the CFTC’s goal of encouraging innovation and enhancing the regulatory experience for market participants at home and abroad, LabCFTC’s mission is to be the FACE of innovation within the Commission in promoting responsible innovation among financial industry, stakeholders, and policymakers by:

• Facilitating dialogue between innovators and those within the CFTC on financial and technological innovations;
• Advancing policy and regulation in financial innovation;
• Coordinating internally and externally with International, Federal, and State regulators, organizations, and associations; and
• Educating internal and external stakeholders on financial technology and innovation in the financial markets to identify how innovations are being used.

Visit cftc.gov/LabCFTC for more information about LabCFTC and sign up here for important LabCFTC updates.