80% Of Crypto Trading Is Automated—So Why Don’t Retail Traders Trust It? Arcanum’s CEO On Fixing The Industry’s Biggest Credibility Gap

Automated trading bots now account for roughly 80% of all crypto trading volume — yet for most retail traders, the space remains a black box, overcrowded with products that overpromise and quietly disappear when the market turns against them.

What’s actually behind that gap, and what does it take to build something that earns trust rather than just asks for it? Mikhail Ivanov, CEO of Arcanum Foundation, has spent years thinking about exactly that — and the answer became Arcanum Pulse: a conservative algorithmic system with a publicly verifiable track record, a security architecture where it is technically impossible to touch user funds, and a philosophy that treats sideways and bear markets not as conditions to survive, but as the primary opportunity to exploit.

In this interview we talk about the state of automated trading, what it actually takes to build with integrity in a space full of noise — and what comes next.

At what point does manual crypto trading stop being sufficient — and why does automation become necessary?

Manual trading stops being sufficient the moment you realize that the strategy is sound, but execution is the problem. A human can identify a good pattern, validate it, even profit from it — but they can’t execute it across 50 or 100 assets simultaneously, around the clock, without emotions, without fatigue, without a single hesitation. At that point, automation isn’t a convenience. It’s the only honest way to translate a strategy into results.

For us, that moment came in 2021–22. We spent a lot of time trading manually in crypto, studying patterns, taking real positions, learning firsthand how the market moves. It was really hard work doing everything by hand. We were an IT company, so we knew how to build systems. At some point, the question stopped being “can we trade well?” and became “why are we still doing this by hand?” And that’s how we built our product.

Explain what a trading bot does? What makes it different from a person doing the same thing?

I prefer to call it an automatic strategy rather than a bot. It executes a defined set of rules — when to enter, when to exit, what position size, under what conditions. A person doing the same thing introduces variables the strategy never accounted for: hesitation, second-guessing, reviewing a drawdown and making emotional decisions. The automatic strategy doesn’t care about any of that. It just executes what it has to — and that’s the core reason for it.

But the more important point is that the bot is only as good as the strategy behind it. Automation amplifies whatever you put in. If the strategy is valid, the bot is a precision instrument — and not only does it perform well, it feels right over time. If the strategy isn’t good enough, any bot will just lose money faster. So the most valuable thing, in our view, is the strategy and methodology that comes before any automation.

Bots reportedly drive 65–80% of crypto trading volume, yet most retail traders still operate manually. From your perspective, what’s behind that gap?

There are a lot of factors, but the most important one is trust — and not without reason. The crypto bot space is full of black boxes, scams, and tools that look beautiful in backtests but fail the moment real capital is involved. Copy trading, exchange-promoted tools — retail traders have been burned enough times to be skeptical. The gap isn’t really about technology or education. The tools exist. The information exists. What doesn’t exist, in most cases, is a track record you can actually verify.

We made a deliberate decision early on to publish every single trade — not screenshots, not monthly summaries, but every trade from day one on a public platform. Over 10,000 trades, visible to anyone. If you can’t show your work and how your strategy performs in real conditions, you’re asking for trust you haven’t earned. And in this space, that’s a significant risk.

“AI” has become one of the most overused words in this space. What’s actually behind that label in most cases, and what should a user look for?

Honestly, most “AI-powered” bots are just rule-based systems with a marketing wrapper. Define a few conditions, add the label, ship it — that’s how most of them work. They don’t have genuinely powerful adaptive tools underneath. And to be fair, building something like that is hard. Even with machine learning, you need a lot of historical data to do it honestly.

For our product specifically, we don’t lean on the AI label — because we think it’s been diluted to the point of meaning nothing. What we rely on is methodology. Every strategy we run goes through hypothesis design, backtesting across full asset histories, paper trading on live market data, and then manual execution by professional traders taking real risk. Only if all those stages pass — more than a 55% success threshold — does the strategy go to automation. We do use machine learning in our backtesting, because testing across 2,000 to 3,000 assets can’t be done by hand. But we don’t lead with the AI label, because what we’re actually selling is a rigorous process.

What specific gap led you to build Arcanum Pulse — what were existing tools failing to do?

Every tool we looked at was either a black box asking for trust it hadn’t earned, or a manual platform that gave you better charts while still requiring you to make every decision yourself. Neither problem was solved well when we started.

We came from a trading background — we’d been active in this market since around 2017, so almost ten years. We understood what a solid strategy looked like, and we knew how to build systems. When we couldn’t find anything that combined both, the answer was obvious: build it ourselves. We developed the methodology first — a four-stage process that takes roughly six months to a year per algorithm — and then built the automation around it. We kept our own capital in the system from day one. If we wouldn’t trust the product with our own money, we weren’t going to ask anyone else to.

Arcanum Pulse runs across numerous assets simultaneously. What’s the reasoning? What does it protect against?

We actually work with more than 200 assets in the system now, and simultaneously the bot can be active across up to 160 positions at once — that was our record in a single day. Concentration risk is a fundamental portfolio problem, not just a crypto one. Running across 100 or so assets simultaneously means poor performance on any single position is naturally absorbed by the overall portfolio. When you have one, two, or maybe three assets in the red, it doesn’t define the picture when 200 are working.

The system is always operating across different market conditions — some assets ranging while others are trending, and the bot finds the motion that exists and captures it. That’s what keeps our bad months around 3% rather than something catastrophic. October 2024 is a good example: the broader market was down around 20% in just two weeks, and our users didn’t lose money — they were down slightly, but the diversification absorbed what would have been a devastating drawdown on a concentrated position.

Most platforms live inside dashboards and apps. Arcanum Pulse lives inside Telegram. Pragmatic choice — or something deeper?

It’s both. Pragmatically: crypto traders already live in Telegram. Their communities are there, their information flow is there, their mobile-first workflow is there. Removing the friction of learning a new interface isn’t a small thing — it’s often the difference between adoption and abandonment. We have strong metrics on this.

But there’s something deeper too. Financial tools have a history of making themselves feel complex in order to feel serious — dashboards with 14 or 15 metrics, interfaces that require training to navigate. I think that’s backwards. The complexity should live inside the system, not in the interface. What the user sees should be as simple as possible. Making adoption easy is not a compromise on quality. It’s part of the design.

Arcanum Pulse just received official Exchange Broker status on Bybit. What does that mean in practice? Why does it matter?

It means we’re operating at a level of infrastructure access and platform recognition that most bots never reach — better API stability, clearer regulatory standing on the exchange side, and a layer of third-party evaluation that we didn’t have to self-certify.

Why it really matters is trust. In this space, trust is hard to establish and easy to lose. You can publish statistics, you can explain your methodology — but institutional clients and serious traders want external validation, something that didn’t come from your own marketing. A formal broker status from a tier-one exchange is exactly that. It means Bybit looked at this product closely enough to give it formal standing, and that carries real weight in the market. As far as I’m aware, we’re among the first products to achieve this on Bybit or Binance at this level. Most bots simply don’t have it.

Over 9,500 closed positions, a 97% win rate, 17,000%+ in cumulative returns. How does your system produce those numbers?

I can’t be fully open about the methodology — if we published it entirely, it wouldn’t be a competitive advantage for long. But the two core principles are low-margin trading and asset diversification. Because we trade with low margins across a very large number of positions, the winning trades accumulate steadily rather than relying on a few large bets. And because those wins are spread across hundreds of assets, the statistical consistency compounds over time. When you have a large volume of closed positions trending positive, the aggregate picture looks the way our numbers look. It’s not a single dramatic trade — it’s the methodology applied consistently at scale.

Arcanum Pulse is designed to perform in sideways and bear conditions. Is that where the real long-term opportunity lives?

I think that’s where the durable opportunity lives, yes. Bull markets are forgiving — you can put money into almost any asset and it will rise. Everything looks like a system when the market is going up. The real test is what happens when it isn’t. That’s when most retail traders discover that the tool they were using was just bull market logic dressed up as a strategy.

We’ve been transparent about this from the beginning. Our statistics are public and they cover the full period since August 2024 — not cherry-picked windows. That includes sideways stretches and difficult months. The 3% bad month figure holds across those conditions. If a strategy can only perform when the market cooperates, it isn’t really a strategy — it’s just a beneficiary of conditions. What we’ve built is designed to find opportunity in any market. That’s the core thesis of the product.

How do you see the relationship between retail traders and automated systems evolving in the near future? Where does Arcanum fit?

The question will shift. Right now it’s “should I use a bot?” In three years, it will be “which bot do I trust, and how do I evaluate it?” The technology barrier is already low. The trust and verification infrastructure isn’t there yet — and that’s where Arcanum fits.

We built for transparency from the start: public statistics, open methodology, skin in the game from the founding team. That’s not just a market position — it’s the infrastructure for the kind of trust that the next wave of retail and institutional adoption will demand.

We also believe the white-label model will become a primary distribution channel. The most credible voices in crypto are communities and creators with existing audiences, not platforms trying to acquire users from scratch. Partnering with those people — letting them offer the product under their own brand, backed by our data and track record — is how you scale without compromising the quality of what you offer.

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