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 more than 11,000 trades, and its first test allocations from institutional investors in the UAE and Hong Kong — a trajectory compressed into twenty-four months that shows how quickly distribution can scale when performance is verifiable in real time.

In an interview with Metaverse Post, Mikhail Ivanov, CEO of Arcanum, walked 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 addressed 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.

From a Telegram Bot to a Multi-Layered Ecosystem

Arcanum has expanded from a single automated trading product into a multi-layered ecosystem, and Ivanov described the role the Arcanum Foundation now plays.

"This summer we passed our second anniversary," he said. "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."

According to Ivanov, a simple bot answers one question, but the company 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. Allocators, meanwhile, need a custody model their compliance team will approve, with only one set of rails — which the Arcanum Foundation owns.

"So we build the software and make everyone happy," he said.

Wave: Semi-Automation for Experienced Traders

Arcanum Wave is the company's most recent major product launch. Ivanov described it as 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," he said. "It has a manual grid, leverage, isolated margin, and extensive data on liquidations, the Fear and Greed index — a widely followed gauge of crypto market sentiment — 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, Ivanov acknowledged: experienced traders and quant desks, since results depend directly on the skill of the person using the algorithms. As an indication of what kind of tool this is, he noted that one trader closed more than 129 profitable trades in a single day in August.

Pulse and Wave: Two Approaches, One Ecosystem

Pulse automates all trading decisions, whereas Wave provides algorithmic signals while leaving final decisions to the trader. Ivanov said the two products answer different questions.

"Pulse answers where to put capital and then requires no further thought," he said. "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 different: users have to engage with it daily, review the signals produced, and make their own trading decisions. Many users allocate roughly 80% to Pulse and 20% to Wave, Ivanov said, keeping some active engagement and the experience of closing trades in strong positions.\nAccess also differs between the two audiences. Pulse can be used both from the company's 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 proprietary tools Arcanum has developed. Wave, by contrast, can only be used inside the 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," Ivanov said.

Building a Proprietary Terminal

Arcanum has also developed its own trading terminal, entering a market where several established platforms already operate. Ivanov said the decision was driven primarily by retail users in the ecosystem: most do not have large enough deposits to independently qualify for the commission levels Arcanum offers, roughly equivalent to Bybit VIP3 to VIP4.

Users who trade via Wave also like to trade manually, and they asked the company to build a terminal within the ecosystem to make that easier. The terminal launched in July, so it has not been live long.

Importantly, Arcanum does not charge its standard 30% profit share when users are trading through the terminal without using its algorithms — a direct benefit the company offers its clients, Ivanov said.

Why a Broker Model

According to Ivanov, Arcanum's main products had 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.

Under the broker model, 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 (qualified institutional buyer)-verified counterparty, a single integration, and reduced fees.

That architecture also foreshadows the custody question Ivanov later identifies as the first — and usually the last — hurdle any strategy faces in front of institutional capital.

Who Arrived First

The first participants were a small community of retail users who joined through Pulse, especially the early cohort from 2024. They came, Ivanov said, because entry was simple — just API keys via Telegram — and because they could verify every trade the company made themselves.

Private offices arrived next, drawn by the same public track record Arcanum publishes everywhere. That, he said, was when the company understood the product had a second life and needed to build something more. Partners came after that, and the white-label direction grew out of it; one partner is among the largest crypto bloggers in the CIS region, with an audience of hundreds of thousands.

Today, six partner brands are running on Arcanum's rails. Institutional allocators are the most recent and, by nature, slowest-moving layer. They engage primarily through distribution, since their time-to-market is measured in days — and the alternative for them 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," Ivanov said.

A Track Record Published in Real Time

Arcanum publishes its trading statistics publicly and in real time. The track record has been public on TraderMake.Money since August 2024 — every trade, nothing reconstructed, Ivanov said. Today the company counts over 11,000 closed trades, with roughly 98% closed in profit.

"But that 98% is a per-trade figure, not an account return," he cautioned. "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. The Sharpe ratio, a standard measure of risk-adjusted return, is around 2.5, at times reaching 3.5. The maximum drawdown was around 20% — mark-to-market rather than realized, Ivanov explained, because the strategy averages into drawdowns without leverage or stops and recovered in under a month. Pulse is long-only, so it diversifies against a traditional book and carries directional crypto exposure.

What Is Driving Institutional Interest

Institutional interest in algorithmic trading solutions has been growing, and Ivanov attributed the trend to two forces. First, crypto has stopped being something committees could not 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," he said. "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, Ivanov said, 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 — a shift that is pushing the market toward non-custodial execution and performance-only fees.

First Test Allocations From the UAE and Hong Kong

Arcanum recently announced its first test allocations from institutional investors in the UAE and Hong Kong. Ivanov declined to name the allocators: the company does not have their permission to publish that data, and in this segment, permission is part of the relationship itself.

What he could describe is what the milestone signals. "A test allocation is a due diligence step, not a commercial event," he said. "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."

One allocator has already increased its deposit fivefold since the test began. Full allocations, Ivanov said, are a matter of quarters. The conditions are consistent everywhere: the strategy needs to run on the institution's account long enough to build its own track record, Arcanum's reporting needs to reconcile with the institution's 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 the company's first algorithm.

The Remaining Obstacles: Custody, Mandate, Due Diligence, Sizing

Asked what stands in the way of broader institutional adoption of algorithmic trading in crypto, Ivanov described what he called 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's wallet, which is why Pulse runs on a sub-account the allocator controls. The separately managed account (SMA) model, which keeps assets in the client's own account, 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 — not a problem for Arcanum. Due diligence kills anything without a track record, but the company's public record since August 2024 addresses that threshold.

There is one more blocker that nobody talks about, Ivanov said: reputational risk inside the institution — an exposure that 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."

Building Rails, Not Just a Product

Arcanum has stated its ambition to build infrastructure that other participants operate on, rather than solely a product investors allocate capital to. Ivanov said the rails already exist and carry real traffic: authorization, execution, commission tracking, and white-label cabinet solutions for partners. Six partner brands are running on those rails today with an identical commission model everywhere.

What is missing is that the strategies running on those rails are still only Arcanum's. The company continues diversifying its own strategies but has not yet launched a sandbox for external developers — the first thing it is working on. The next step is allocator-grade reporting that fund administrators can reconcile without Arcanum in the loop; when the company started, it did not have enough experience with family funds and their specific reporting requirements, and it is actively building for that now. The final step is opening the rails to external managers who bring their own strategies.

A Third Algorithm in October

Reflecting on the two years, Ivanov noted that Arcanum launched its terminal during this period and is planning to launch its third algorithm in October — one that will trade the underlying assets themselves rather than the perpetual futures Pulse trades today. "It is performing well in testing, so stay tuned," he said. The October launch is the nearest milestone in a build-out that also includes the planned sandbox for external strategy developers and allocator-grade reporting — steps the company has laid out on the way to opening its rails to outside managers.

Source: Metaverse Post

Arcanum on X: @ArcanumPulse