NMR is the reward and governance token of the Numerai protocol. Numerai was founded by Richard Craib and began as a start-up in Silicon Valley, California. The company was formed in 2015 with the strategy of capitalising on network effects of having data scientists collaborate to make the best algorithmic hedge fund. Like other blockchain projects, data scientists who contribute will be rewarded in payment; however as Numerai is betting on markets, these scientists are rewarded differently based on the performance of their contributions. Because it is an open-source blockchain project, Numerai has many different data scientists worldwide instead of a normal hedge fund which employs workers in-house. These data scientists are rewarded for their input, originally in Bitcoin but the company has since created their own cryptocurrency to reward its contributors. Essentially, this protocol can be considered as an open source ‘AI’ hedge fund which relies on the power of the crowd of contributors to make money in markets with its predictive algorithm. NMR is built on the Ethereum blockchain. Data scientists are rewarded with tokens when participating in ‘tournaments’ which are the rounds held where they can contribute to the code.