Numerai, a San Francisco-based hedge fund, last week announced that 1,000,000 tokens of its new cryptocurrency, Numeraire (NMR) were issued to 12,000 data scientists.

“We are releasing a new money abstraction for Numerai. It begins a new commerce with our data scientists based on long-term alignment not possible with regular money”, Numerai said in a blog post. “It is a new cryptocurrency called Numeraire, and it makes collaboration compatible with self-interest.”

Furthermore, Numerai issued 1,000,000 Numeraire crypto-tokens to its existing 12,000 data scientists on the basis of their past performance in Numerai tournaments. It specifically said that there will be no crowdsale.

“Numeraire can be earned right now by competing in Numerai’s data science tournaments. In a sense, Numeraire is mined by data mining Numerai’s data, and submitting predictions is the proof of work”, Numerai added.

Founded in 2016, Numerai recently raised funds from big investors such as Renaissance Technologies. Notably, it pays its staff in bitcoins for building machine learning data models, Finance Magnates reported.

Founder Richard Craib believes that cryptocurrency solutions will have a considerable effect on the future of markets.

“Numeraire is a cryptocurrency for the data science citizenry of Numerai, and it makes collaboration compatible with self-interest”, he said.

“Numeraire solves coordination between Numerai and users, giving Numerai a limitless ability to expand while giving users ability control the stock market”, added Geoffrey Bradway, ex-Google Deepmind, now VP of Engineering at Numerai.