What’s the origin story of Smith and Crown?
Smith + Crown has been producing independent and frontier research across the breadth of the blockchain industry since 2013. As an organization, we’re passionate believers in the power and potential of both blockchain-based technologies as well as the cryptoeconomic and incentive systems that they enable. It’s our goal to create the world’s best research, intelligence and analysis and to enable its access and use as broadly and effectively as possible.
What does Smith and Crown do and what problems does it solve?
Smith + Crown has three primary areas of activity: research, advocacy and consulting.
We produce a wide range of research including the openly available Smith + Crown Intelligence platform (SCI). SCI is the single largest repository of freely accessible professional and independent research on blockchain and cryptofinancial technologies available anywhere, with research across hundreds of assets and topics. Our team of researchers, analysts, designers and engineers worked hard to build the tool that we have personally sought for years: a credible and freely available information resource that tracks and analyzes the industry as it develops.
In addition to our public research we do quite a bit of advocacy work. We’re the chief research advisor to the Chamber of Digital Commerce’s token initiatives and working groups, and active advisors to the Social Alpha Foundation, among numerous others. We also regularly conduct behind the scenes education for institution leads and officials around the world.
Our primary business is our advisory work. Our team has specialized for half a decade in understanding the frontier of cryptoeconomic design as well as its application across business models, industries and use cases. We work with high potential projects to help tackle challenging questions of cryptoeconomic, incentive and mechanism design. Additionally, we do quite a bit of work in the enterprise space to help established organizations understand the complex opportunities and challenges presented by the emerging application of blockchain technologies to existing industries.
When it comes to crypto market data APIs, what problems did you need to solve?
Since we aspire to cover the breadth of the space, this translates into high market coverage requirements as far as number of exchanges and markets covered. Due to our focus of ever improving information access, there is also the need for assurances via visible and progressive attenuation of the wide and varied challenges that teams face developing quality aggregated price series towards better and better metrics.
What were you using before Nomics?
We utilize a collection of internal and external systems to both crosscheck various providers’ quality and approach and to provide a wide surface area for our research practice to draw upon for data and analytical needs. Nomics was chosen as the primary market data provider to both Smith + Crown Intelligence (our public-facing research platform) and our internal data modeling systems.
Why did you ultimately decide to use Nomics?
For us it was relatively straightforward—in our review of the current set of market data providers, Nomics’ API provided superior value and quality compared to the other market data options available. We also appreciate the values and goals of the Nomics team in pursuing transparency and accuracy in an increasingly noisy industry.
How are you using the Nomics API? (Use cases, screenshots, etc. are all very welcome here)
At this point we use almost every Nomics API market endpoint in some way. Our intelligence platform and internal research tools have extensive needs for a variety of market data sets and we use Nomics as the starting point for a range of analysis that our team conducts. On our SCI platform, we provide an extensive range of asset profiles and analysis from our research team. Market data, current market insights and historical indicators are all important to understanding any asset, and we pair these data-driven insights with our analyst research through our various markets views.
Our team also conducts a wide range of original research across the larger blockchain and cryptofinancial industries and leverage the data from nomics as part of these investigations and explorations.
What has your experience been like?
Nomics has responsive, communicative and highly personable throughout our use of their service.
Why would you recommend the Nomics API to others?
Absolutely. Nomics on several occasions has helped us navigate complex data API integrations in a collaborative, personal and helpful manner. Given the importance of reliability and communication when it comes to a data partner, we have been consistently impressed by the quality of service and commitment to alignment and shared success that we have seen from Nomics.
Where can folks go to learn more about what you’re doing or followup with questions?
Our research and intelligence platform can be found here. It’s completely free, so we encourage readers to check it out for themselves and send us any feedback or comments. We welcome any outreach around advisory, bespoke research engagements or platform integrations and can be reached at: research@smithandcrown.com.
Note to Readers: Are you doing something exciting with the Nomics API that you think the world should know about? If so, we’d love to hear from you. Reach out to us via our contact form to let us know what you’re working on and why it would make a great case study for our blog.
If your case study is relevant to our audience, we’ll share in on the blog. If it’s really compelling, we’ll share it on Twitter, our forum, and maybe even publish a press release or invite you to our podcast to talk about it.
