Marlowe for Financial Markets

Boosting the soon-to-launch full Marlowe implementation and pioneer program with dedicated community for financial market traders and DeFi.

Passionate about financial markets and trading since my student days, I have been a derivatives trader in big corporations and on the trading floor since 2000. DeFi and crypto trading since 2018. Developing my own quantitative trading software. Funded proposer with BlockCarbon.

[IMPACT]

By creating a website and all the social media channels and tools necessary for an open, collaborative community (discord, telegram, gitbook, github, twitter, youtube), I want to share my passion for financial markets with prospective users of Domain Specific Language Marlowe. Together, we will add content about how to correctly and easily build smart contract solutions for TradFi problems and trading applications with an early focus on JavaScript.

Overview of what Marlowe is and what problems it will solve:

https://marlowe-playground-staging.plutus.aws.iohkdev.io/doc/marlowe/tutorials/marlowe-model.html

Walk-through of current status and use-case examples:

https://iohk.io/en/blog/posts/2022/03/04/diving-deeper-into-the-marlowe-playground/

It is important that new joiners from other blockchains and traditional finance can easily understand and deploy Marlowe for their projects. Existing Catalyst projects that can add functionality or complexity using Marlowe contracts should find everything in one place, even if it was generated elsewhere. We want to be this community, and provide a friendly, informative and high-quality source of all things Marlowe and finance/trading/DeFi on Cardano. Open Source projects on Cardano should always be able to have a broad range of free example contracts and educational content available, even if in the future TradFi users migrating to DeFi will have to pay for Marlowe education or solutions.

This project is dependent on the successful full implementation, first on testnet and later on mainnet, and education program by IOHK expected to launch in the first half of 2022, to come to full fruition. I see no obstacles to building a community around Marlowe Playground first, but adoption to reach 100s and 1000s of users would require real world usability. Additional functionality, like the ability to write Marlowe contracts in other language familiar to quantitative finance users like Python and finance devs like C++ would be a big plus.

Another challenge to this project - as with all open standards projects - is scattering content across many portals, websites or repositories by well-meaning groups and individuals. I am totally open to cooperation and merging efforts with anyone doing this - the end goal of having something that helps us build openly, outside paywalls and copyright restrictions, without Big Tech and legacy financial institutions, is bigger than any one moderator, influencer or sub-community.

[FEASIBILITY]

I had a talk with the Marlowe team in January who interviewed me (and many other prospective users) about the planned Marlowe Pioneers program. I am planning to participate in that program and use Marlowe with the BlockCarbon team that I am a part of regardless of this proposal.

"Marlowe for Financial Markets" would be in addition the equivalent of 10 hours per week for a year of my time and dedicated input for the sake of Open Standards and Open Source use of Marlowe, for example in Catalyst DeFi projects, startups, individual traders and founders unable to afford external developers and consultants.

The roadmap and timeline are just that - creating content and answering questions, being there for all the likeminded users and pioneers on Telegram, Discord, Youtube. 

52 weeks @ 10 hours per week @ "Open Standards" discounted rate of $25 per hour = $13000

Costs for website, hosting, a Fiverr service here and there to make it look nicer and reach more people $1000

Total budget = $14000

Thomas Wedler

Experienced energy derivatives trader and entrepreneur. Ex Shell, Vattenfall, Masefield senior 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 energy market conferences and workshops. Involved in crypto trading since 2014 and DeFi/oracles since 2018.

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

[AUDITABILITY]

Auditing Open Standard community projects relies largely on the community adoption and traction and less on the $TVL or contracts deployed. Therefore, I am below giving targets to measure success on the quantity of users and content only. I think it is likely that the project will become much more than the sum of its parts by helping and inspiring others to create content on Marlowe, apply it to other fields and in other ways, and in turn bring more people into the community.

After 3 months = 200 active Telegram/Discord users, 6 tutorial style videos, reaching/mentoring 2 Catalyst proposals using Marlowe

After 6 months = 500 active Telegram/Discord users, 12 tutorial style videos, reaching/mentoring 6 proposals using Marlowe

After 12 months = 1000 active Telegram/Discord users, 24 tutorial style videos, reaching/mentoring 12 proposals using Marlowe

In addition to quantitative targets, the daily interaction on social media and response time to serious would-be users and newcomers should be easy to identify.

Not a continuation of a previously funded project. However, this project can share Open Source content from my previously funded and current proposals and my colleagues at BlockCarbon:

F7: Boosting Cardano's DeFi

Carbon as DeFi Asset | BlockCarbon

https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/381939

F8: DApps and Integrations

Carbon Marketplace and Exchange

https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/398034

F8: The Great Migration (from Ethereum)

Carbon ERC-20 Converter to Cardano

https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/398046