As of Friday, all core team submissions to the budget system were complete for the May budget cycle. This month's budget cycle is approximately 95% subscribed as of today. We currently expect the next superblock to occur at approximately 10am UTC on Friday. Therefore, the voting deadline is sometime tomorrow at about 10am UTC.
Dash's continuing rapid and dramatic value fluctuations remained a challenge to our budget process this month. The good news is that because the price of Dash continues to remain elevated, many budget categories that previously required funding can continue to safely depend on existing balances set aside in previous cycles that have grown in value since the beginning of the year.
You may notice that there continue to be categories of funding that are typically recurring expenses that were not present this month. These include the following budget categories:
1) Infrastructure / Datacenter
2) Infrastructure / Applications
3) Dash Offices
4) Business Development
5) Public Relations
As with last month, the absence of these budgets is not a sign that the core team intends to discontinue any of these expenses. It is simply that the balances we normally keep in these categories to protect against currency fluctuations has risen in value dramatically and we can rely on savings to fulfill our obligations, even after taking currency fluctuation risks into account.
One of the lessons learned from our recent price increases is that we should be more prepared with ready-to-submit one-time expense projects. The combination of a larger budget and larger balance sheet occurring at the same time opened up huge amounts of budget quickly. The core team can and should do a better job of providing the network with well-considered options to keep the competition for these excess funds healthy and robust. Ideally, we should be "warehousing" projects that could be outsourced to third parties, and are non-urgent, but important / valuable to the network.
At the moment, our primary attention is focused on interviewing, hiring, and onboarding our new contractors. As those efforts wrap up and our new team structure fills out, I am committed to preparing options for the budget the next time we experience a large price increase.
We have started the process already, as the Copay wallet is an example of the type of project we can outsource without much overhead from the core team. We have also started obtaining quotes for academic or professional security audits, research in partnership with ASU and other institutions, and outsourcing of specific projects that would accelerate development.
If you have questions or concerns, please include @babygiraffe in your comment and I'll do my best to reply in a timely manner. Thank you all for your continued support!
May Core Team Budget Requests:
Core Team Salaries
https://www.dash.org/forum/threads/proposal-core-team-contractors-may.14603/
This proposal provides continued funding for existing core team resources - 2,702.83 Dash
HD Wallet
https://www.dash.org/forum/threads/proposal-hd-wallet-project.14628/
This proposal will provide DASH a fully-functional hierarchical deterministic (HD) wallet - 321.90 Dash
Conferences & Travel
https://www.dash.org/forum/threads/proposal-consensus-leadership-summit.14630/
This proposal funds the attendance of most of the Dash Core Team leadership to attend Consensus 2017 - 195.79 Dash
Dash's continuing rapid and dramatic value fluctuations remained a challenge to our budget process this month. The good news is that because the price of Dash continues to remain elevated, many budget categories that previously required funding can continue to safely depend on existing balances set aside in previous cycles that have grown in value since the beginning of the year.
You may notice that there continue to be categories of funding that are typically recurring expenses that were not present this month. These include the following budget categories:
1) Infrastructure / Datacenter
2) Infrastructure / Applications
3) Dash Offices
4) Business Development
5) Public Relations
As with last month, the absence of these budgets is not a sign that the core team intends to discontinue any of these expenses. It is simply that the balances we normally keep in these categories to protect against currency fluctuations has risen in value dramatically and we can rely on savings to fulfill our obligations, even after taking currency fluctuation risks into account.
One of the lessons learned from our recent price increases is that we should be more prepared with ready-to-submit one-time expense projects. The combination of a larger budget and larger balance sheet occurring at the same time opened up huge amounts of budget quickly. The core team can and should do a better job of providing the network with well-considered options to keep the competition for these excess funds healthy and robust. Ideally, we should be "warehousing" projects that could be outsourced to third parties, and are non-urgent, but important / valuable to the network.
At the moment, our primary attention is focused on interviewing, hiring, and onboarding our new contractors. As those efforts wrap up and our new team structure fills out, I am committed to preparing options for the budget the next time we experience a large price increase.
We have started the process already, as the Copay wallet is an example of the type of project we can outsource without much overhead from the core team. We have also started obtaining quotes for academic or professional security audits, research in partnership with ASU and other institutions, and outsourcing of specific projects that would accelerate development.
If you have questions or concerns, please include @babygiraffe in your comment and I'll do my best to reply in a timely manner. Thank you all for your continued support!
May Core Team Budget Requests:
Core Team Salaries
https://www.dash.org/forum/threads/proposal-core-team-contractors-may.14603/
This proposal provides continued funding for existing core team resources - 2,702.83 Dash
HD Wallet
https://www.dash.org/forum/threads/proposal-hd-wallet-project.14628/
This proposal will provide DASH a fully-functional hierarchical deterministic (HD) wallet - 321.90 Dash
Conferences & Travel
https://www.dash.org/forum/threads/proposal-consensus-leadership-summit.14630/
This proposal funds the attendance of most of the Dash Core Team leadership to attend Consensus 2017 - 195.79 Dash
