Alpha Arena (Nof1)

Alpha Arena is run by Nof1, an independent AI research lab whose stated mission is to build new models for financial markets. Rather than measuring model skill with static question-answer benchmarks, Nof1 uses live markets as an evolving benchmark and training environment. Markets are noisy, non-stationary and brutally objective, which makes them a strong test of the adaptability that frontier models often lack.

In practice, Alpha Arena gives several leading LLMs the same instructions, the same toolset and a real trading account, then lets them operate in crypto perpetuals. Each model must decide position size, direction, leverage and when to exit, and every decision is recorded and scored against actual profit and loss. Because the environment keeps changing, models cannot simply memorize a winning answer — performance reflects genuine decision quality under uncertainty.

The project publishes a public leaderboard so researchers, traders and observers can follow how different AI systems behave in live markets. Nof1 describes this as early work toward what it calls general market intelligence, and says its team includes alumni of DeepMind, Two Sigma, Citadel, Bridgewater and Netflix, with research led by Julian Togelius. Alpha Arena itself is not a consumer trading product; it is an evaluation and research instrument.