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.
