Anonymous in the sense that numerai does not ask for any personally identifying information. You could easily prove you are who you say you are in numerai.

Also, I think the big benefit from a data scientist working on this is you can test methods with generic features, submit the results and get paid if they are good, but not submit any part of the methodology to any third party.

If you can kill it on numerai then maybe you would consider buying data sources and apply your methods to your own data. Although you still don't know what the features are.

It's the polar opposite of open source.

The owners don't have to trust the data scientists. They evaluate their results against additional data.