One Boston FinTech startup, Quantopian, is open-sourcing its application to coders interested in researching and testing financial investment data. The company provides tools that allow anyone, if they have the ability, to "write market-beating algorithms."

Founded in 2011, the company has raised US$24 million as a hedge fund startup, using crowd-sourced data to create and manage investments for many types of investors.  John Fawcett, chief executive and founder of Quantopian, told the Globe:

"The most important trend behind our business is the explosion of data available from the real economy."

The history of the free software movement, which led to the creation of open-source software, took root in the 1980s, in part in Boston at MIT. Today, companies all over the world are open-sourcing all kinds of software, allowing anyone to take it and use it to innovate, which is resulting in exploding tech and FinTech growth.

Andrew Campbell, Business Analyst of Quantopian, sat down with CoinTelegraph for a discussion on how they are using open-source software to change the financial landscape.

CoinTelegraph: What is Quantopian and what do you guys wish to accomplish in the current FinTech environment?

Andrew Campbell: Quantopian is a free platform for research, testing, discussing, and deploying stock trading algorithms. Top performers on Quantopian will be invited to join our crowdsourced hedge fund, the Quantopian Managers Program, where their algorithms will be backed by a multimillion-dollar pot of investor capital. As a part of the managers program, an algorithm writer is given a share of the profits they generate.

We also run an algorithmic paper trading contest called the Quantopian Open. Each month we award $100,000 in backing to the winning algorithm writer. After six months, they keep all the profit their algorithm produces.

Like many other FinTech startups, the recent explosion in data lies at the core of our business. Advances in data mining and machine learning coupled with availability of deep and diverse datasets have given trading algorithms a bigger edge than ever over their human counterparts. We believe everyone should have the tools to harness this wave of innovation and generate market beating returns.