Tradara: From Crypto Questions to a Playground for People and AI

For years, friends and family came to me with the same questions: “How do I buy crypto?” “What should I buy?” And, usually after the price had already gone up, “Is now a good time?”

I understood why they asked. I had been following crypto since the early days. But following a market doesn’t mean knowing what it will do next. I didn’t have a crystal ball. I still don’t.

What interested me was understanding how the market worked. Over time, I noticed recurring patterns and connections between events, sentiment, timing, and price movements. These weren’t guarantees, but they were things worth exploring. The question became: could I give people a place to explore them without putting their savings on the line?

That was the starting point for Tradara.

A safe place to practice

I built a paper trading app where people could practice with virtual money and real market prices. They could buy, sell, test an idea, and see what happened before spending a cent. Getting something wrong could become a useful lesson instead of an expensive mistake.

Learning by doing

As people started using it, I realised that giving them a trading screen was only part of the answer. They also needed help understanding what they were looking at and why it mattered.

So I added an Academy with structured lessons about trading and market mechanics. But I didn’t want to recreate the experience of reading a textbook and hoping some of it would stick. I wanted people to try something, get curious about the result, and then use the lessons to understand it. Practice gives the theory a reason to matter.

Trading together

The next step came from a different question: what if learning to trade could also be something people did together?

I added competitions so friends, colleagues, and students could trade against each other in a virtual environment. Suddenly, a trading decision became something to discuss, compare, and occasionally tease a friend about. A global leaderboard gave individual users another way to join in.

Talking to the market

Then came TradaraAI, bringing learning and actions into a conversation. Users could ask questions, explore the market, and manage their virtual trading through chat. It gave people another way into the product, especially when they weren’t sure where to start.

“Let my AI agent trade for me”

One of my favourite product ideas came while I was trying to persuade a friend to join a competition.

“I don’t have time,” he told me. “Let my AI agent trade for me.”

Fair point. Apparently, even virtual trading needed delegating.

That conversation led me to add MCP connectivity, a way for external AI agents to interact with Tradara. People could now connect their own agents, test how they behaved in a sandbox, and let them compete on their behalf using virtual funds.

Where Tradara is today

Today, Tradara has grown into a learning playground for both people and AI agents. Users can practice on their own, work through lessons, compete on the global leaderboard, or organise competitions with people they know. They can make the decisions themselves or build an agent and see how its decisions hold up.

More than 1,000 users now actively trade on Tradara, and the community keeps growing.

Each stage has come from watching how people use the product and listening to what they ask next. What started as my response to “What crypto should I buy?” has become a place where people can explore their own answers, learn from the results, and have some fun along the way.

See Tradara alongside my other products on the Ventures page, or try it yourself at tradara.ai.