Numerai has made significant progress on our master plan. The Meta Model ensembles intelligence from every frontier AI model and hundreds of elite data scientists around the world. The Unity dataset supports capturing alpha from all data sources. Atomic Blockchain Staking is decentralizing the tournaments. The hedge fund has grown. So, what’s next for the tournaments?
Merging the Tournaments
We are Unifying the Numerai and Signals Tournaments. The Numerai Crypto tournament is not part of this unification, so this section does not pertain to Numerai Crypto whatsoever. Here is how merging the Numerai and Signals will work:
Before December 31: check model names and scripts.
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If you have a model in one tournament with the same name as another model in the other tournament, you should rename them. Otherwise, both are renamed on December 31 to _classic and _signals, which may be a breaking change.
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Scripts that look up models by name should use model IDs instead. IDs never change.
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We will release upgrades to NumerAPI and Numerai-CLI that will be required to avoid potentially breaking changes to your pipelines. Stay tuned.
December 31 (round 1432): the last Signals round.
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Signals stake can no longer be changed, and pending Signals stake changes are cancelled. Instead, your stake moves to Numerai automatically as legacy rounds resolve over January–March.
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Your Signals models become Numerai models with the same IDs and history, and signals.numer.ai redirects to numer.ai.
January 1, 2027 (round 1433): Signals and Classic become one tournament.
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All models submit to the same rounds. Existing Signals submission code keeps working, but submissions will be forwarded to tournament 8.
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All models are scored against one Meta Model, ranked on one leaderboard and staked round by round with Atomic staking, as Classic is today. The 2027 season begins.
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Titles, reputation and past results carry over.
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Your model limit is set by the better of your Classic and Signals titles, plus any extra slots granted in either. Models over this limit are grandfathered in.
January–March 2027: open Signals rounds finish.
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Signals rounds up to 1432 keep scoring and paying under Signals rules until they resolve. The last resolves around March 31.
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Your Signals stake moves into your Numerai staking strategy a little at a time as those rounds resolve, and the rest after the last one.
Please tag “@teamteamteamteam” members in Discord if you have any further questions.
Deleting old datasets
Starting today, we are introducing a new policy of deleting old versions of training and validation datasets. New versions exist for a reason: they are meant to replace older versions, not supplement them. Leaving old datasets available is misleading for everyone.
Effective immediately:
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All Classic dataset versions before v6 are being removed.
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All pre-v6 data is no longer available.
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All pre-v6 Model Uploads have been deactivated.
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All Signals dataset versions before v3.1 are being removed.
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Training and validation data for v3 are no longer available.
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Live data for v3 will be discontinued on Jan 1, 2027.
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Going forward, there will only ever be 1 official version on which to train your models with some backwards compatibility for live data when possible.
Agentic Onboarding
We’re overhauling onboarding to be even more agent-friendly, with the new experience coming early next year.
Notebooks made sense when people went through onboarding by hand, but as more users onboard with agents, we think we can do better. Notebooks run in a hosted environment your agent has less control over, and one you won’t use after onboarding. The new experience will help you set up your local environment first, then walk you through training and uploading your first model. You’ll be able to ask your agent more questions along the way and finish with an environment ready to keep building in.
We’ll also continue expanding the tooling in our open-source repos, so your agent is better equipped to assist you, both during onboarding and beyond.
Neutral Benchmark Model Contribution (NBMC)
A model can have high NCORR and still contribute nothing more than our simple LGBM, which we already know how to make. BMC measures whether your model is additive to our existing benchmark models, and we recently made a Neutral version called NBMC. Plenty of models with positive NCORR have non-positive NBMC. This means we are paying people for alpha that is trivial to generate and is not properly aligning incentives with the ensemble.
So, we believe that replacing NCORR with NBMC in the payout function is necessary. NBMC is still locally determinable, so nothing about your workflow becomes guesswork. Something as simple as training a model to be neutral to example predictions should be able to achieve better NBMC.
NBMC is already visible on the Signals leaderboard. For rounds starting January 1, 2027, NBMC will replace NCORR in the payout formula. Exact multipliers will be announced soon.
Staking and NMR
Bring Your Own Wallet (BYOW). We will begin implementing support for “bring your own wallet” soon. We will start with support for MetaMask on our website and will add other providers based on popular demand. This is an effort to expand our web3 integrations and continue decentralizing the tournaments.
Fixing stale NMR metrics. With the introduction of Atomic Blockchain Staking, Numerai has drastically increased NMR traffic on the blockchain, with millions of dollars worth of NMR now locked in the contracts. We recently got the new Numerai Staking contracts listed on DefiLlama, but there are many more metrics platforms where NMR’s utility is underrepresented. We are working to change that and show the blockchain community what Numerai is really doing with NMR.
Contract Upgrades. The Ethereum L1 “Glamsterdam” Update will make on-chain storage more expensive. This means our gas fees for operating contracts will substantially increase unless we refactor some of the storage logic in the contracts. On top of that, we want to support “staking credits”, a way to provide free stake to new users without releasing that NMR to the open market. We will be making updates to our contracts to reduce gas costs and support stake credits. Expect updates coming in the near future.
Native L2 support. This is a longer-term goal: making NMR available everywhere, and potentially routing small stakes to an L2 to cut gas costs to near-zero. L2s will stick around for a while even as L1 Ethereum continues to upgrade. Robinhood even launched their own chain recently! We want to ensure the NMR ecosystem extends to the major L2s so everyone can access NMR’s utility wherever they want to transact.
Stablecoin Staking. Numerai has paused development of stablecoin staking support because our attention is fully focused on Unity and providing agentic tools to the community. While stablecoin staking is not currently a priority, we may revisit this idea in the future.
Numerai Risk
Numerai has paused development of the Risk tournament we proposed at NumerCon. We liked the idea when it was announced at NumerCon, but marginal improvement in risk estimation didn’t help very much in tests. Internal research produced a benchmark model for the risk tournament, but found it wasn’t helpful in backtests. What helped more was improving returns estimates, discovering new risk factors, and releasing those to users in new neutralization matrices and targets such as we just did for Signals.
Numerai Crypto Early and Often
We launched Numerai Crypto over 2 years ago. Since then, it’s grown to lock up over half a million dollars worth of NMR. It’s time to do more with the Crypto Meta Model by running it earlier and more often. We will be working to move the Crypto tournament to start around 24:00 UTC, 7 days a week.
We already start the data pipeline at 24:00 UTC, so it will be as simple as triggering the round directly after the data is prepared, which typically only takes about 10 minutes. This will allow downstream consumers of the Crypto Meta Model to use it more quickly and trade it more accurately.
The Future of the Tournaments
Unifying Classic and Signals, improving alignment with BMC, and more decentralization will push the tournaments toward greater synergy with the hedge fund. Unification allows us to focus development on a single tournament structure. Improving alignment will ensure tournaments stay perpetually valuable to our strategies, and thus, more valuable to the users. Decentralization will allow the community and the NMR ecosystem to thrive.
Updates on all of the above will be posted in the Numerai Discord.