Core Development and Research September 2023 by reuben

Why?

This is the tenth 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 slightly down from last month tracking Bitcoin. Our previous request was to cover the costs in July but due to the state of the Community Fund, we only are making the request for September.

Core team gets about ~16000 FIRO a month or around ~USD23,360. USD1.46/FIRO

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: 2,500 USD This is engaged from Cypher Stack and covers the running of all our infrastructure.

Community Support: 1250 USD As Lucas has gone to pursue his career in geography, we have temporarily engaged Alexa to cover holes in our community support.

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 have also engaged a 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: USD 48,450.00 and 2400 FIRO/month

Deficit: USD25,090 and 2400 FIRO 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 21,000 worth of FIRO to cover as much of the shortfall as possible and we dig into our reserves and supplement it with donations. If the situation continues, Reuben will take a pay cut to preserve some runway.

Total requested: ~USD21,000 in FIRO equivalent.

Breakdown:

Research: USD3,500

Work continues on curve tree research and also exploring the best way to deploy AMMs on Spark Assets.

Development: USD15,000

This covers the cost of one junior developer, one senior developer (on flexible hours) and one senior developer (full time).

Sysadmin: USD2,500

This covers the 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.