Core Development and Research October 2023 by reuben

Why?

This is the eleventh request to the CFC as we committed to do month to month requests instead of a lump sum request. Markets have been trading in a range but went up recently due to Bitcoin ETF news. For the good part of October, price was hovering around USD1.40-USD1.50/FIRO but is now currently at USD1.60/FIRO.

Core team gets about ~16000 FIRO a month from the share of the block reward.

Breakdown of Core Team Expenses

Developer Pay (covers 4 developers Peter, Levon, Gevorg, Narek and Sproxet) 30,000 USD/month

Research: 3,500 USD/month We have reduced the number of hours for research as we preserve our runway though research work is still ongoing at a slower pace.

Admin/Support/Management (including Reuben) 9000 USD/month (covers Reuben, Anwar, Ajay)

Hosting Fees: 1,000 USD/month This covers Github, Continuous Integration, Matrix, chat bridges, seed nodes, explorers, light wallet servers, testnet and website hosting fees. The bulk of this is on explorers and the light wallet support which require beefier specs.

Sysadmin: 1,250 USD (Previously 2500 USD) This is engaged from Cypher Stack and covers the running of all our infrastructure. This is reduced from 2500 USD/month after Cypher Stack kindly agreed to reduce their charge during the bear.

Community Support: 900 USD (Previously 1250 USD which was reduced from 2500 USD) We have engaged Batuhan to assist with community management and additionally have two freelance community managers looking after the Vietnam and Japanese groups. Alexa from CypherStack will no longer be used for pure cost reasons. We thank her for her two months of service!

Market Making 2400 FIRO and 1200 USD/month We have funded an extension of the Hummingbot Miner to ensure we remain liquid on Binance organically which remains to be our main market. The company has kindly agreed to waive its platform fees so these rewards go directly to the liquidity miners at no extra cost. We intend to cease this campaign at the end of November.

We continue to engage Market Making as a Service solution to support Coinstore and Bitmart which requires 3 months upfront payment (3600 USD) which we have paid already and are evaluating. Additional discounts are available for prepayments.

Total: US46,850 and 2400 FIRO/month

Deficit: USD21,760 and 2400 FIRO This is based on Core Team receving 16,0000 FIRO based on USD1.55/month (average of current price vs older price) which is equivalent to USD24,800.00

Do note that the deficit is only an estimate and is based on the current market price. This figure changes with the ebbs and flows of the market.

How much?

We are requesting USD 21,750 worth of FIRO to cover as much of the shortfall as possible and we dig into our reserves and supplement it with donations.

Total requested: ~USD21,750 in FIRO equivalent

Breakdown:

Research: USD3,500

Promising work has been made on improving curve trees to work together with Halo2. Our research team has also been assisting a group of interns under Poramin who have been working on a PoC of Spark Assets.

Development: USD17,000

This covers part of our development cost salaries.

Sysadmin: USD1,250

This covers the discounted cost of a sysadmin to monitor and manage our infrastructure.

We won't be requesting volatility protection especially this will be on a month to month basis.

We are requesting for this proposal to be reviewed on a month to month basis by the Community Fund Committee so that in the event market conditions improved we can cease this and we can also adjust the amount requested.

The core team as a general principle does not want to make requests from the Community Fund unless absolutely necessary and we appreciate the support.