Market Making, Development and Research April 2023 by reuben

Why?

This is the sixth request to the CFC as we committed to do month to month requests instead of a lump sum request. Markets have held steady at USD2.20 to USD2.30 but we are still operating at a deficit.

Core team gets about ~16000 FIRO a month or around ~USD36,000. USD2.25/FIRO

Breakdown of Core Team Expenses

Core team expenses are slightly higher as we engage Sproxet to help us finish up Spark and other housekeeping tasks.

Developer Pay (covers 4 developers Peter, Levon, Gevorg, Narek and Sproxet) 30,000 USD/month This month is higher because Sproxet has returned as a freelancer to assist with cleaning up our Electron GUI and also input selection logic. Last month (24,000 USD/month)

Research: 7,000 USD/month (but min 4,000 USD/month). This is a combination of retainer and per hour basis consultation.

Spark Assets paper updated to include NFT support. Research on JAMTIS proposals. Research on possible other consensus mechanisms.

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.

Market Making 3400 USD on DMiner (last month 6333 USD for centralized miner (cminer).)

Community Fund Committee has taken over the centralized exchange market making on three exchanges so core team is no longer bearing the cost of this. Core team monitors and manages the relationship with Armada Labs. The 3400 USD is to cover rewards and platfro mfees for the decentralized exchange liquidity market making on PCS. Previously platform fees were waived but Armada is now charging 1400 USD as platform fees and 2000 USD for rewards which goes to users.

For Cminer, while not relevant to this current proposal, we will be ceasing Bittrex support and moving support to Huobi due to Bittrex's exit from the US market and Huobi has some organic volume that we want to support.

Total: USD 52,900.00/month (last month figure was USD 52,538.75)

As you can see this excludes any sort of marketing or unexpected costs and we are relatively lean. For core team to break even on this budget, the price of FIRO needs to be at USD3.11.

Deficit: USD16,900 a month. 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 16,400 USD worth of FIRO to cover the majority of the shortfall. We will utilize some of our reserves to cover any shortfall.

Total requested: ~USD16,400 in FIRO equivalent.

Breakdown:

Dminer (Decentralized liquidity mining) campaign: USD3,400.00

Research: USD4,000 This covers the base retainer for one of our cryptographers. Note we have negotiated lower rates and these researchers can demand for much more at other companies but continue to work with us because of their belief of the project and the long term relationship we have established.

Development: USD9,000

This covers the cost of one junior developer and one senior developer (on flexible hours)

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.