DFP10: Fund PARROT9 to work on Balanced until the end of 2024

DFP10: Fund PARROT9 to work on Balanced until the end of 2024

We (PARROT9) are requesting 7 months of funding to cover Balanced’s frontend, design, content, and infrastructure needs until the end of 2024.

Income: 32,000 bnUSD per month
Infrastructure costs: 200 bnUSD per month
Total: 225,400 bnUSD

If approved, our team of 4 will make Balanced our primary focus so we can fast-track its growth. We’ll design and build new features (e.g. cross-chain loans and concentrated liquidity), integrate cross-chain connections, intensify our cross-chain marketing efforts, and ship regular enhancements to the app, stats page, website, and docs.

The infrastructure costs will cover hosting of the app, stats page, docs, and blog, as well as the Balanced contributors’ use of GitHub CoPilot.

As this is a large quantity to request (and receive) at one time, the funds will be sent to a smart contract. Doing so ensures that we can only claim compensation for the time that’s passed since the funding period began, and the community can vote to return the remaining funds if they’re unsatisfied with our progress.

Our current grant ends on May 31, so we plan to start the vote in ~5 days to avoid any downtime. The DAO Fund currently holds ~105k bnUSD, so we’ll need to withdraw some liquidity from the sICX/bnUSD pool to cover the full amount.

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A number of questions were asked over in Discord, so I’ve collated the questions & answers here to make them accessible to everyone.

How did the price of $8k per month come about?

We’ve used a rate of $2,000 per week per contributor. This is the same rate we used for previous proposals, but now we’re committing more time.

Last proposal was a lot smaller. Did you complete all the work you set out to do? Do we get a summary like the time before?

The last proposal charged the same rate, but for less time. Here’s how that one broke down:

  • 2x front-end developers: 2 weeks per month each
  • 2x designers: 1 week per month each
  • Me (content/UX/design lead): 2 weeks per month

In reality, we all spent much more time on Balanced than this. One of those front-end developers is not under the PARROT9 umbrella, and he brought in another dev to help for no extra cost.

The time required for specific design & dev work is difficult to estimate at the outset, especially as priorities change often, so DFP8 was intended to cover our time for 4 months, during which we completed as much work as we could. The latest roadmap update provides a pretty thorough snapshot of the work completed during the first 3 months of the proposal:

During the final month of the proposal period, we’ve been working to finalise the Avalanche connection (launch date imminent) and the design for cross-chain loans. The latter has required a complete rebuild of the prototype to replicate full cross-chain functionality (which has taken 4 weeks so far), and once it’s finished, it will replace the demo on the website.

How large was the team in the previous funding period. Same as now?

The last proposal was supposed to cover 5 contributors, ended up being 6. The new proposal will only cover the PARROT9 team (4 contributors), but the other 2 devs will also be moving full-time, funded by another source to alleviate pressure on the DAO Fund.

I would suggest to get part of the monthly payment in ‘locked up BALN’ 4 years, to get some skin in the game and align success.

Appreciate the suggestion. As a core contributor since Balanced’s founding, BALN has made up the majority of our income, so we’re already financially aligned with Balanced’s long-term success.

The volatility that came with that almost killed our team last year, so to make sure we can run a sustainable business, we need cash to pay the bills this year, not 4 years from now. If the community would like to avoid selling too much POL we could take a portion of the payment in sICX instead, but as we won’t receive it all at once, it still presents some risk for our team.

The sustainability of the DAO Fund is of utmost concern here, especially given its current revenue. We’re also uncomfortable requesting such a large amount upfront, but we faced internal pressure to commit our team to full-time work until at least the end of the year. Doing so will allow us to grow Balanced quickly and keep pace with the smart contract developers, rather than restrict the time we put in so we can work on other projects while our role in Balanced becomes the bottleneck. At the end of the year, if the revenue hasn’t picked up enough to sustain full-time work, or we clear our workload enough that we no longer need to be full-time to keep up, we can drop back to part-time coverage.

We’re also open to reduce the time allocation for this proposal to 3 weeks per month for each contributor ($24,000 per month / $168,000 total), but any less than this will affect Balanced’s growth.

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Hey @lifeofkaizen - thanks for taking the time to address the questions / comments from Discord. I think some fair points have been raised, but also see the unique value brought to Balanced by parrot9 having worked together for so many years.

After reading the proposal and comments on Discord I’d be more supportive of the 3 week/month proposal, primarily because of the state of funding of the DAO.

  • 3 week proposal = ~170,000 / ~1M of non-BALN assets = ~17% of the DAO’s balance sheet

  • 4 week proposal = ~225,000 / ~1M of non-BALN assets = ~22.5% of the DAO’s balance sheet

Looking at the current state of revenue, the DAO made ~3.5k per month on average the last 2 months, which is negligible in terms of offsetting this cost. Of course, by the end of your proposal, I think we all hope that this number will be much larger. Until then, my preference is to be more conservative with DAO Funding as to not find the project in a similar situation as it was prior to ICON’s investment.

As for removing liquidity vs taking payment in sICX, I think the best solution would be to take the payment in bnUSD + sICX from the DAO Fund, and add a super simple method into your receiving-contract that swaps the sICX for bnUSD. @Andell can probably help get it done in a few minutes. I know one is already written for the CPS.

Thank you for your time and effort into the proposal.

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First of all. I would vote yes on whatever proposal you put out. If only for the reason you have guys done such an awesome job so far.

I would like to draw attention to a small problem though. Currently the DAO makes about $ 3600 a month (average of last 2 months). Taking any substantial amount out of POL would only bring this number down.

absent of significant increase in trading fees, this isn’t sustainable, so I would be more comfortable committing to a shorter timeframe, and seeing the result of integrating one, or maybe 2 chains first.

That being said, it appears backend work is seriously outpacing frontend at the moment, so we could operate on the assumption that your availability currently is the biggest bottleneck for Balanced / Icons master plan coming to fruition.

@benny_options: damn you for making my points while I was typing this :stuck_out_tongue:

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