Algorithmic Trading For Every Level: Arcanum’s Mikhail Ivanov On The Platform’s New Terminal, Institutional Milestones, And A Third Algorithm Coming This Fall
Two years ago, Arcanum was a single trading bot running inside a Telegram chat. Today it is a Bybit-licensed broker infrastructure supporting six white-label partner brands, two proprietary algorithms with a public track record of over 11,000 trades, and its first test allocations from institutional investors in the UAE and Hong Kong. That trajectory, compressed into twenty-four months, is either an unusually disciplined product roadmap or a case study in how fast distribution can move when the underlying performance is verifiable in real time.
In this interview, Mikhail Ivanov, CEO of Arcanum, walks through the architecture of what the company now calls its ecosystem: how Pulse and Wave address fundamentally different trader profiles, why Arcanum built its own trading terminal rather than integrating an existing one, and what the broker model unlocks for partners and allocators that the API approach never could.
He also addresses the structural obstacles still slowing institutional adoption of algorithmic crypto trading, what a test allocation signals in due diligence terms, and what comes next, including a third algorithm targeting spot assets and the eventual opening of Arcanum’s rails to external strategy developers.
Arcanum has expanded from a single automated trading product into a multi-layered ecosystem. How would you describe the role of the Arcanum Foundation today? What needs does the ecosystem address that a standalone trading bot cannot?
This summer we passed our second anniversary. We started in August 2024, and it has been quite a journey to where we are today. Back then, Arcanum was just one trading bot on Telegram. Today we are an official Bybit broker with our own platform, a white-label cabinet, and six partners running their brands on our rails. A simple bot answers one question, but we kept encountering three others. Retail users need an entry point as simple as possible for a new trader. Active traders need signals and execution on a single screen, without searching for information across multiple sources. Partners need a platform under their own brand without writing code or building significant infrastructure. And allocators need a custody model their compliance team will approve, with only one set of rails, which Arcanum Foundation owns. So we build the software and make everyone happy.
Arcanum Wave is the company’s most recent major product launch. How would you describe its function and intended audience?
Arcanum Wave is a genuinely interesting product. It is a semi-automated algorithm for people who want to trade themselves, and much faster than Pulse. For an hour candle, there are six entry windows per day, with a ranked list of coins and a signal scored from one to 100. It has a manual grid, leverage, isolated margin, and extensive data on liquidations, the Fear and Greed index, and other inputs traders need for position decisions. It works both ways, long and short, by design. The trader sets the parameters and decides what position to take.
The target audience is narrow, and I will say it openly: experienced traders and quant desks. Results depend directly on the skill of the person using our algorithms. One trader closed more than 129 profitable trades in a single day in August. That speaks to what kind of tool this is.
Pulse automates all trading decisions, whereas Wave provides algorithmic signals while leaving final decisions to the trader. What is the rationale for offering both approaches? How do users typically engage with the two products? Do they commit to one or use both?
It is an interesting question, and we have a lot of data on how users actually engage with our algorithms. First of all, the two products answer different questions. Pulse answers where to put capital and then requires no further thought. It is fully automated. It trades only long perps, with no leverage, no stops, and only daily candles. People put a portion of their deposit into Pulse and watch their balance grow.
Wave is quite different. Users have to engage with it daily, review the signals we produce, and make their own trading decisions. Many of our users allocate roughly 80% to Pulse and 20% to Wave, keeping some active engagement and the experience of closing trades in strong positions. The audiences also differ in how they access the products. Pulse can be used both from our broker account and from the Telegram bot, and those are two different approaches. Through Telegram, users do not need to fund a broker account. They simply provide API keys and subaccount access to the algorithm. Within the ecosystem, Pulse runs alongside some proprietary tools we have developed. Wave, by contrast, can only be used inside our ecosystem via a broker account.
In terms of user journey, very few people start with Wave and then move to Pulse. Almost always it goes the other way: people try Pulse first, build trust in it, and then move to Wave.
Arcanum has also developed a proprietary trading terminal, entering a market where several established platforms already operate. What considerations led to building an in-house terminal rather than integrating existing solutions? What advantages does it offer compared to general-purpose platforms?
We built our own terminal primarily for retail users in our ecosystem. Most of them do not have large enough deposits to independently qualify for the commission levels we offer, roughly equivalent to Bybit VIP3 to VIP4. That was the main driver. Users who trade via Wave also like to trade manually, and they asked us to build a terminal within the ecosystem to make that easier. We launched it in July, so it has not been live long.
Importantly, we do not charge our standard 30% profit share when users are trading through the terminal without using our algorithms. That is a direct benefit we offer to our clients.
What motivated the development of the broker ecosystem? In what ways does it change the landscape for individual traders and for institutions entering crypto markets?
Our main products have certain limitations. The API model has a ceiling: one sub-account runs only one strategy, with no shared wallets and no way for a partner to build a real platform on top of it. The broker model removes those constraints. Capital moves by internal transfer within Bybit, so funds never leave the exchange. Users log in through their own Bybit account, identified by User ID (UID). Deposits come only from that account, and withdrawals go only back to it, so every operation at the UID level is consistent and can be verified through Bybit support. For a retail trader, that means access to institutional-grade conditions without needing a million-dollar account balance. For institutions, it means a QIB-verified counterparty, a single integration, and reduced fees.
Who benefits most from Arcanum? How does it simplify the entry process for different types of participants? Which of the audiences joined first?
First came a small community of retail users through Pulse, especially the early ones from 2024. They joined because entry was simple, just API keys via Telegram, and because they could verify every trade we made themselves. Then the first private offices arrived, drawn by the same public track record we publish everywhere. That was when we understood the product had a second life and we needed to build something more. Partners came next, and the white-label direction grew out of that. One of them is among the largest crypto bloggers in the CIS region, with an audience of hundreds of thousands. We provide the platform under their brand.
Today we have six partner brands running, and institutional allocators are the most recent and slowest-moving layer by nature. They engage primarily through distribution, since their time-to-market is measured in days. For an allocator, this matters most. The alternative is either building an internal crypto trading desk or skipping crypto entirely. The ecosystem delivers the most direct benefits to retail users, but without all the other participant types, it would not be an ecosystem.
As for our ecosystem, the earliest users from Pulse came first, and then new ones followed one by one.
Arcanum publishes its trading statistics publicly and in real time. Could you share the current core performance figures? What conclusions do you believe can be drawn from them at this stage?
It has grown stronger every day. Our track record has been public on TraderMake.Money since August 2024. Every trade, nothing reconstructed. Today we have over 11,000 closed trades, with roughly 98% closed in profit. But that 98% is a per-trade figure, not an account return. A single win rate across thousands of trades tells you nothing about portfolio performance on its own. The portfolio-level numbers are 20% to 35% net per year since launch. Our Sharpe ratio is around 2.5, at times reaching 3.5, and our maximum drawdown was around 20%, but that was mark-to-market rather than realized, because the strategy averages into drawdowns without leverage or stops and recovered in under a month. Traders across multiple markets note that the mechanism behaves as designed. Pulse is long-only, so it diversifies against a traditional book and carries directional crypto exposure.
Institutional interest in algorithmic trading solutions has been growing. From your perspective, what is driving this trend? How is it affecting market dynamics?
Crypto has stopped being something committees couldn’t touch and has become a legitimate line item. A committee can no longer simply decline this market, this product, or this algorithm; it now has to evaluate an instrument with documented methodology, a verifiable record, a custody model, and a named counterparty. Discretionary crypto treasuries offer none of that. Supply is the second driver: very few managers can show every trade from day one with no gaps in reporting. The result is that capital now arrives through infrastructure. Allocators want assets to remain in their own accounts or inside the exchange perimeter, with the strategy running on top, and that is pushing the market toward non-custodial execution and performance-only fees. That changes how the market functions.
Arcanum recently announced its first test allocations from institutional investors in the UAE and Hong Kong. How significant is this interest at the current stage? Are full-scale allocations anticipated? What conditions would need to be met for institutions to commit at that level?
For now, I will not name our allocators. We do not have their permission to publish that data, and in this segment, permission is part of the relationship itself. What I can speak to is what this signals. A test allocation is a due diligence step, not a commercial event. It means we have passed the stage where most crypto products stop: someone with a mandate looked at the custody model, the public track record, and the methodology, and decided the next question required live capital on their own account. At this point, one of our allocators has increased their deposit fivefold since the test began.
Full allocations are a matter of quarters. The conditions are consistent everywhere: the strategy needs to run on their account long enough to build its own track record, our reporting needs to reconcile with their administrator, capacity has to be confirmed on their side, and the counterparty relationship has to clear internally. Current discussions are in the range of $100,000 to $5 million, against a capacity of over $100 million in our first algorithm.
What obstacles remain to broader institutional adoption of algorithmic trading in crypto? How is your platform addressing these challenges?
As I said, it is the four horsemen of the apocalypse for any strategy seeking capital: custody, mandate, due diligence, and sizing. Custody is the first question, and usually the last. Most institutions cannot send capital to a manager’s wallet. That is why Pulse runs on a sub-account the allocator controls. The SMA model is the key tool for clearing this blocker, and the broker model addresses it as well, since funds never leave the exchange. Mandate means the instrument has to be describable in traditional terms, which is not a problem for us. Due diligence kills anything without a track record, but our public record since August 2024 addresses that threshold. There is one more blocker that nobody talks about: reputational risk inside the institution. That exposure is significant and almost invisible. How do you avoid it? For now, I think it is just a matter of time. You build reputation consistently, and it compounds.
Arcanum has stated its ambition to build infrastructure that other participants operate on, rather than solely a product investors allocate capital to. How far along is that vision? What’s the next step?
The rails already exist and carry real traffic: authorization, execution, commission tracking, white-label cabinet solutions for partners. Six partner brands are running on our rails today with an identical commission model everywhere.
What is missing is that the strategies running on those rails are still only ours. We continue diversifying our own strategies, but we have not yet launched a sandbox for external developers. That is the first thing we are working on. The next step is allocator-grade reporting that fund administrators can reconcile without us in the loop. When we started, we did not have enough experience with family funds and their specific reporting requirements, and we are actively building for that now. The final step is opening our rails to external managers who bring their own strategies.
It has been an interesting two years. We launched our terminal during this period, and we are planning to launch our third algorithm in October, one that will trade the underlying assets rather than perpetuals. It is performing well in testing, so stay tuned.
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About The Author
Alisa, a dedicated journalist at the MPost, specializes in crypto, AI, investments, and the expansive realm of Web3. With a keen eye for emerging trends and technologies, she delivers comprehensive coverage to inform and engage readers in the ever-evolving landscape of digital finance.
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Alisa, a dedicated journalist at the MPost, specializes in crypto, AI, investments, and the expansive realm of Web3. With a keen eye for emerging trends and technologies, she delivers comprehensive coverage to inform and engage readers in the ever-evolving landscape of digital finance.
