Project summary

Small-scale support for an independent researcher in Thailand to implement and integrity-test Whale Lab v2, a preregistered crypto market-microstructure research pipeline, with public reporting of methodology, failures, null results, and limitations.

What are this project's goals? How will you achieve them?

Whale Lab studies the execution state and completion behavior of protocol-visible Hyperliquid TWAP orders.

The immediate goal is not to produce a profitable trading strategy. It is to build a reliable experimental pipeline capable of distinguishing genuine findings from data-quality or implementation failures.

A previous confirmatory attempt failed data-integrity and reconciliation checks and remains permanently recorded as a failed run. The revised v2 protocol has now been frozen.

During the funded period I will:

• implement the frozen integrity and duplicate-handling rules;

• build the preregistered acceptance suite;

• verify that planted synthetic defects trigger the required failure detectors;

• reprocess permitted historical TRAIN and VALIDATION data only after integrity checks pass;

• document progress, failures, limitations, and sanitized evidence publicly.

Model fitting and the prospective TEST will only proceed when the frozen prerequisites are satisfied. The protocol will not be changed to obtain a desirable result.

How will this funding be used?

I am requesting up to $400 for a three-month research and implementation period.

The evidence-based budget is approximately:

• Hetzner CPX22 collector hosting: ~$32

• Claude Max / Claude Code: $300 for three months

• ChatGPT Plus: $60 for three months

Total expected cash requirement: approximately $392, with the small difference to $400 allowing for exchange-rate or billing variation.

I already have $100 in AWS promotional credit, which is expected to cover archive/data-access costs, so no additional AWS funding is requested.

Funding is strictly for research infrastructure and development tooling. It will not be used as trading capital, leverage, or for cryptocurrency purchases.

Who is on your team? What's your track record on similar projects?

I am the sole researcher and developer.

I have already built OI-VOL, a multi-exchange crypto derivatives research system that collects and analyzes open interest, volume, funding, price, and cross-exchange activity.

I have also built the research infrastructure underlying Whale Lab and completed its feasibility, forensic, and preregistration phase.

My research process emphasizes falsification rather than selectively reporting positive results. Previous studies have produced negative or null findings, including hypotheses that failed after execution costs or failed to show directional edge, and those results have been retained in the research record.

Whale Lab's first confirmatory attempt also failed integrity checks. Rather than reinterpret the result, I preserved the failure and designed the new frozen protocol around the identified measurement problems.

Public research materials are available at:
https://github.com/viter999/quant-market-research

What are the most likely causes and outcomes if this project fails?

The main failure modes are additional data-integrity problems, insufficient measurement quality, inability to satisfy the frozen acceptance gates, weak predictive information after development, or a prospective result that fails to support the hypothesis.

These are scientifically acceptable outcomes.

If integrity requirements fail, the project will stop before modelling rather than bypass the checks. If the hypothesis ultimately fails, I will report the negative result rather than retune the experiment after seeing the outcome.

Even in failure, the project should produce useful documentation about data quality, experimental design, integrity controls, and limitations in independent crypto market-microstructure research.

How much money have you raised in the last 12 months, and from where?

$0 in external cash funding.

I currently have $100 in AWS promotional cloud credit, but this is a restricted service credit rather than cash funding. My GitHub Sponsors application is pending approval and has generated no committed funding to date. The project has otherwise been self-funded.