Please describe your proposed solution.

As our ecosystem grows and amazing businesses are built on it, these protocols will launch the next generation of crypto assets: governance tokens and utility tokens will come of age. Unfortunately, free data on the current top Cardano native tokens like AGIX, INDY, JPG, WMT, MIN, SUNDAE, GENS, WRT, MILK, EMP, C3, FACT, COPI or IAG is of very poor quality. The problem comes in two typical flavors:

• established data APIs like Binance’s, Coinmarketcap or Coinpaprika that have subpar quality for trading or risk use, and are USD-denominated end-of-day data, or
• fragmented DEX data that is hard to download for relevant periods, and even more difficult to integrate into your own dataframe, spreadsheet or trading tool.

In this Concept-stage proposal for a working MVP, we will launch a native asset data portal for the top 10 native tokens. This data will be ADA-denominated and cleaned, meaning it can be used for back-testing and distinguishes between bid, ask or theoretical AMM quotes.

The team (supported by the company's in-house and freelance developers) will collect, contribute, own, use and distribute high-quality, cleaned and aggregated market data. APIs, algorithms and Python convenience programs will be provided as part of the launch product. The proposal’s Github repository will be free to use for everyone, and we will set up a community support around Issues and contributions to benefit from the collective brain trust of our great community. All Milestone reporting will make use of Github to receive early feedback from the community and future users and ensure maximum transparency and relevance.

This data from CoinGecko and Minswap DEX show: established external data APIs have bad, USD denominated data while the Cardano community does have the data, but it is not usable in a trading and risk management context.

Please define the positive impact your project will have on the wider Cardano community.

Total value locked in DEXes on Cardano is a little above $100 million at the time of writing. This compares with $3.5 billion in Uniswap alone. While some protocols have decent valuation in theory, this value does not yet mean very much, stifling innovation and financing outside of Catalyst: teams cannot sell their tokens and interested investors cannot buy these tokens in meaningful quantities at “fair” prices. The liquidity and transparency simply is not there yet.

Crypto and Cardano need to gradually and sensibly grow a new financial system that is at least as robust, more equitable and cheaper than traditional finance. Availability of reliable price data, risk management frameworks, data management and backtesting packages is a necessary step in that direction. Only if people understand the risks and opportunities of native assets can they start trading them in size, and invest in them with longer time horizons and bigger portfolio percentages than current "novelty / collectible" character of most tokens.

Size of Cardano DEXes TVL at the time of writing around 3% of Uniswap.

What is your capability to deliver your project with high levels of trust and accountability? How do you intend to validate if your approach is feasible?

Team members have worked decades in TradFi markets, hold Master of Finance and quantitative finance degrees and work with financial and commodity companies for trading, risk management and decision making software.

Sapient Predictive Analytics has been in the data science, machine learning and collective intelligence space since 2018, winning awards and recognition in Singapore and beyond. We have previously worked with Fraunhofer Institute, Macquarie bank and many small and medium size companies for their decision making, governance, data analytics and trading desks.

<https://www.18hall.com/sapient-predictive-analytics/>

Feasibility of our approach will be ensured by sharing every milestone along the way on the Github page and allowing future users and the wider community to use, contribute and provide feedback to ensure data and packages can offer actionable time series analysis for the Cardano DeFi universe of fungible tokens.

What are the key milestones you need to achieve in order to complete your project successfully?

Milestone 1: Mar 2024 (dedicated website, case study for 1 native asset with usable time series for trading, risk management quality, scaffolding of API infrastructure)

25% of total budget (ADA 21,125)

>Milestone 2: Apr 2024 (community feedback and contributions enabled, actively updated Github presence and 3 native assets with usable time series, first integration of packages around zipline, heatmap tool, bare bones API)

25% of total budget (ADA 21,125)

>Milestone 3: Jun 2024 (10 native assets with usable time series, volatility integration and end-of-day simulation of ADA options for risk management framework, positive community engagement and working API)

25% of total budget (ADA 21,125)

>Final Milestone (4): Jul 2024 (polished product, presentation of result and close-out video, visibility and social media)

25% of total budget (ADA 21,125)

Who is in the project team and what are their roles?

Thomas Wedler: project management and trading-related content

Experienced financial trader and entrepreneur. Ex Shell, Vattenfall, Masefield senior futures and options trader. Individual floor trader at Singapore Exchange. Tom has been building and deploying programs for automated market making and energy derivatives since 2014. 15 years Derivatives experience at multi-national organizations working closely with industry bodies and speaker at market conferences and workshops. Involved in crypto trading since 2014 and DeFi/oracles since 2018. Plutus Pioneer, Marlowe Pioneer and Atala Prism Pioneer.

Thomas is a certified Superforecaster with the Good Judgment Project and winner of the inaugural Hybrid Forecasting Challenge at SAGE / University of Southern California.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomas-wedler-18960/

Role in Catalyst: Challenge Team (Fund 8-10), Sub-circle3, Catalyst Coordinators (funded proposers), Veteran Proposal Assessor, Reviewer in funded project milestone reporting (PoA pilot) Fund 9 & Fund 10

June Akra: project management and risk-management related content, community

Sapient developer team: to provide UI front-end and API for the portal

Founding member of BlockCarbon, financial market expert and academic with vast experience in risk management, derivatives and commodities. Experience for various risk functions in 2 billion dollar AUM fund. Holder of Master degree in Investment with distinction and awarded Draper Prize. Certified Quantitative Finance (CQF) alumni London. Experienced video editor, content creator with combined 50,000 followers on social media, NFT collector and creator. Certified python AI practitioner, Plutus Pioneer & Atala Prism Pioneer.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/june-a-a3a0b4174

Role in Catalyst: Challenge Team (Fund 7-10), Sub-circle3, Catalyst Coordinators (funded proposers), Veteran Proposal Assessor, Reviewer in funded project milestone reporting (PoA pilot) Fund 9 & Fund 10

Please provide a cost breakdown of the proposed work and resources.

All cost budgeted at ADA 125 / hour

Project management: 3,000 ADA for 5 months -> 15,000 ADA

(120 total hours)

Website, portal and API development: 5,000 ADA for 5 months -> 25,000 ADA

(200 total hours)

Data acquisition, cleaning, automation 10K USD = 37,500 ADA

(300 total hours)

Hosting and infrastructure costs 2.5K USD = 7,000 ADA

(itemized costs to third parties)

How does the cost of the project represent value for money for the Cardano ecosystem?

This project is a "concept" proposal that builds on a highly successful template: using open source, grassroots investors to share data and open source trading packages to build something far exceeding the single expertise or capacity of the individual or any one organization.

Highly creative, robust and self-correcting collaboration that is the hallmark of open source finance as shown by the dynamic Python quant and trader communities.

The free to use and open source character will ensure that the time series, API and platform outputs can be leveraged by anyone wanting to analyze and trade native fungible tokens and the potential is there to integrate more sophisticated trade signal generation from machine learning packages and grow beyond the initial 10 token cohort.

Availability of clean, back-testing compatible data will allow growth of trading API and DeFi trading strategies that can boost liquidity and improve price discovery.