Author: Patache Digital
Discussion: Upcoming Patache Digital (Patache) Community Spend Proposal regarding Cellar Development
Goal
The goal of this forum post is to discuss the upcoming Patache Digital Community Spend proposal.
The proposal is for 1M SOMM tokens to support the development of at least 8 new Cellars over the next year by Patache.
In this post, we would like to discuss the content of the proposal and provide an opportunity for the community to provide feedback before the vote goes live.
Context
Patache is a partnership formed by AlgoReturns (Algo) and Erik Mayo. Algo has developed turnkey algorithmic trading products that service the entire spectrum of needs of traditional market participants such as FCMs, CTAs, Brokers, and Traders – both institutional and retail. Erik Mayo has done some strategic advisory work for Sommelier and proposed the original idea which evolved into the AAVE cellar developed by Seven Seas. The Patache team has more than 120 combined years of risk, trading, programming, research, and financial services experience from the largest financial institutions and investment management organizations including Deutsche Bank, MetLife, Stanford Management Company, and Greenwich Capital Markets. Patache is truly a unique combination of decades of trading experience and signal/system design with superior risk management and technical capabilities. Patache plans on augmenting the Sommelier ecosystem by developing, implementing, and operating profitable Cellar strategies. We already have two strategies on the platform. The Steady Eth and Steady BTC cellars.
Community Spend Proposal: Cellar Development
SIPS Name:
Status: Not Yet Proposed
Author: Patache Digital
Discussion: Proposal for Community Pool SOMM Grant to Patache Digital
Mission
Patache‘s mission is to take its existing asset-agnostic strategies and adapt them to the DEFI environment as well as develop additional profitable strategies on Sommelier to help grow the ecosystem.
Sommelier, as a platform, will benefit from a new and diverse set of Cellars and Strategy Providers. We believe that supporting the effort of bringing Tradfi experts to release Cellars in the Sommelier ecosystem will help cement Sommelier as the place for experienced strategy developers to release their strategies in the Defi ecosystem. Once the Sommelier ecosystem has matured, prospective Cellar development teams attached to more traditional firms will use existing firm resources or raise funds to release their strategies on Sommelier.
Proposal
Grant of 1M (”one million”) SOMM to Patache as a strategy development partner with the goal of creating a diverse set of Cellars on the Sommelier protocol. This grant will support 12 months of Cellar development and maintenance.
Granting Strategy Providers with SOMM tokens also contributes to aligning the interests of the Strategy Provider and the platform as it incentivizes the Strategy Provider to contribute to the overall success of the Sommelier platform in addition to running its own strategies.
Patache’s expertise in commodities, FX, and fixed income as well as risk adjusted algorithmic strategy development makes them uniquely placed to take advantage of the opportunities that Defi offers in both yield and directional strategies. The team’s reputation and contacts in Tradfi position them to educate traditional market participants about using Sommelier to access strategies unique to the Defi ecosystem, including the SteadyBTC and SteadyEth strategy we recently launch. The release of these strategies shows the efficacy of translating existing and developing new strategies for Defi participants, where they can self-custody their assets instead of depending on an opaque centralized party to do so. This is one of the key items which brought us to Sommelier and recent market events have made even more appealing to both us and players in centralized markets with whom we speak.
Team Background
Patache’s technology team is led by a CTO with 30+ years of IT experience, of which over 20 years have been in Financial Services. Patache’s CTO has managed the delivery of systems across Trading, Compliance, Credit, Market and Liquidity Risk, Portfolio Management, and Commercial Real Estate.
The other professionals on the team have each have 20+ years in financial service software development, trading, and investment. Team members have multiple years consulting, developing strategies for and investing in the crypto ecosystem.
Patache endeavors to work on ideas that service an underserved or neglected market where modern technology and data science applications can play a significant role in reigniting market demand. Therefore, our technology is ideal for the current state of the Defi ecosystem given the lack of traditional trading tools and our ability to develop them.
We do focus on data and the available infrastructure to make realistic data science applications. We are generally agnostic towards technology choices, but we prefer to build a bespoke robust technology stack instead of adopting the latest trend in technology.
Bios:
Patache’s CTO brings 30+ years of IT experience, of which over 20 years have been in Financial Services. He has managed the delivery of systems across Trading, Compliance, Credit, Market and Liquidity Risk, Portfolio Management, and Commercial Real Estate.
He is currently at a large Wall Street asset manager where he manages the architecture, design, and delivery of systems across a broad range of asset management functions. In a prior role, he was with MetLife for 15 years where he held various positions of increasing responsibility and served as Director for over 10 years. He managed MetLife’s Credit Risk and Market Risk application portfolios and was instrumental in the delivery of their Financial Reengineering project. This project integrated over 150 MetLife financial systems worldwide. In prior roles with both Prudential, and the US Department of Defense, he built multiple custom proprietary systems.
He holds a BS in Electrical Engineering and an MS in Physics from BITS Pilani in India, an MBA(Finance) from the University of Iowa, and an MS in Computer Science from the New Jersey Institute of Technology.
Indrajit “IC” Chatterji, FRM - Mr. Chatterji has 20+ years of experience in financial services, specifically in investment and risk analysis. He was, until March 2020, Vice President and Head of Credit Risk for Brighthouse Financial Inc. (a spinoff from MetLife), prior to which, he was in Risk Management with MetLife for 10 years where he held positions of increasing responsibility. At BHF, he was responsible for establishing the credit risk function in an environment akin to a start-up. He developed proprietary risk models and implemented monitoring systems for securities and derivatives risk limits. He has represented BHF credit risk to regulators, rating agencies and the Board. Mr. Chatterji began his career with GE Capital Analytics, India where he built his data science and business management skills before moving to the US to continue his corporate career. Mr. Chatterji has an undergraduate degree in Accountancy from the University of Calcutta and an MBA (Finance) from the Indian Institute of Management in Lucknow, India. He also holds the Financial Risk Manager (FRM) certification granted by GARP (Global Association of Risk Professionals) where he is a volunteer exam writer for the GARP FRM program.
David R. Rentschler, CFA - Mr. Rentschler has 30+ years of experience in the financial services industry, focusing primarily on research in high yield, private equity, mezzanine, distressed debt, and corporate restructurings across a broad range of industries. He has executed hundreds of transactions and invested billions of dollars based upon his analyses. Mr. Rentschler started his career as an associate in the valuation practice at Deloitte & Touche. He then joined the Huff Companies and was part of the core team that grew assets under management from less than $350mm to over $20 billion in his 16 years with the firm, progressing from a research analyst to Research Director and partner. During his tenure at Huff, Mr. Rentschler worked closely with the portfolio companies, serving as acting CEO for one, and was a board member of several others. After leaving Huff, Mr. Rentschler joined a turnaround and restructuring firm before founding Rentschler & McIntyre which was a general financial consulting firm. He also worked as a consultant with Washington Corner Capital Management, a family office. Mr. Rentschler holds a BA Economics from the Pennsylvania State University, and an MBA (Finance) from Lehigh University. He is a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) charter holder.
Erik Mayo - Mr. Mayo is an active investor and advisor to early-stage companies in the US and Latin America in fintech and digital asset strategies. Mr. Mayo proposed the strategy that became the initial SOMM/Seven Seas AAVE Cellar. Two decades of experience in direct and fund special situations, systematic trading and credit investing including financing of renewables through ABS and off-taker agreements as a Partner at Terra Incognita Capital and Fintan Partners. Deep emerging markets, structured credit, and special situations portfolio management experience. International expertise focused on fixed income, derivatives, investment, and risk management. Before founding Fintan Partners, Erik worked as an Investment Associate of Absolute Return at Stanford Management Company. Prior to joining Stanford, Erik worked as an analyst with Lazard Asset Management and at Bankers Trust in risk management and trading systems. Erik earned a B.S. in Economics from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
John Seguin - Mr. Seguin has spent 30+ years in the commodity futures market as a Commodity Market Trader, Analyst, Strategist, and Educator. He has been a futures market broker on the floors of the largest futures exchanges for several large financial services companies including Discount Corporation of New York, Greenwich Capital Markets, Sanwa Securities LLC, Sanwa Bank, and FIMAT. Mr. Seguin has developed a unique perspective from his bird’s eye view of auction markets as an FCM and his commitment to the logic of Market Profile. For nearly 25 years he has combined his deep understanding of Market Profile’s auction market dynamics with the real-world knowledge of how markets function, and how individuals and institutions act in those markets. In 1992, while at Sanwa Securities, the primary dealer arm of Sanwa Bank USA, Mr. Seguin developed a novel proprietary tool that advanced Market Profile concepts to longer timeframes, specifically Weekly, Monthly, and Quarterly periodicities. Mr. Seguin eventually launched this as MacroGraph, a unique charting tool for commodity, forex, and stock market traders and investors. Mr. Seguin received a BA in Sociology and Education from Lewis University.
Neil Gandhi, Esq. - Mr. Gandhi has 15 years of experience blending law, finance, and technology. Mr. Gandhi began his career in the legal department of the New York Stock Exchange and then practiced securities law with various firms in New York City. He was also a Vice President with Legalease, LLC, a legal process outsourcing company. For the past 5 years, Mr. Gandhi has had his own law practice. Mr. Gandhi focuses his law practice on advising financial companies and technology startups. Mr. Gandhi holds a BA in Economics from New York University and a JD from Fordham Law School. He is admitted to practice law in New York and New Jersey.
We aim to build a dedicated team to focus on Defi opportunities and continue strategy development and maintenance for future Sommelier cellars. While Patache is developing its internal expertise, Patache is partnering with Seven Seas to bring its strategies to the platform.
Responsibilities
- Thoroughly back test all strategies before execution
- Ensure all contracts are audited before being made available to public
- Work with SOMM and Seven Seas to develop automated reporting of cellar performance
- Communicate adjustments of Cellar strategies to the public through social media channels and/or dedicated Cellar info website in at least an annual summary.
Deliverables
- Minimum of 8 Governance-approved Cellar Strategies for 1 year beginning from grant distribution
Grant Funding
Total amount: 1M (”one million”) SOMM tokens
New Strategy Development
A portion of the grant will be used for the initial development of 8 Cellars / strategies, including:
- Data science research for sustainable economic opportunities
- Additional resources to facilitate smart contract development
- Maintenance costs associated with running analysis, back testing and real-time monitoring and execution servers and software
- Testing strategies live before proposing to Governance
Ongoing Strategy Execution
A portion of the grant will be used primarily for costs associated with continued operations of live Cellars such as:
- Cloud infrastructure for deploying strategies
- Training and running machine learning models and live analysis and execution of strategies
Additionally, a SOMM token grant advances incentive alignment of the Strategy Provider team and the Sommelier platform to foster long-term cooperation.
Conclusion
In this post we outlined the upcoming Patache Community Spend Proposal regarding Cellar Development.
We would appreciate any feedback on how to ensure the proposal best reflects the interests of the Sommelier Protocol and Community.