Development and Research July 2023 by reuben

Why?

This is the ninth 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.

Core team gets about ~16000 FIRO a month or around ~USD26,720. USD1.67/FIRO

Breakdown of Core Team Expenses

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

Research: 5,000 USD/month This is a combination of retainer and per hour basis consultation.

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: We have ceased market making services and instead will rely on the Hummingbot Binance campaigns. until its expiry in August 4th and re-evaluate options. We will also start up our own bots and do self market making.

Total: USD 47,500.00/month

For core team to break even on this budget, the price of FIRO needs to be at USD2.97

Deficit: USD20,780 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 the entirety of the shortfall. Our reserves are quite depleted so we would appreciate a full coverage for this month.

Total requested: ~USD21,000 in FIRO equivalent.

Breakdown:

Research: USD3,000

While our research costs are usually higher, Aram is currently being funded by the MAGIC Fund on his work with curve trees so the costs are lower. Aram is currently focusing on properly documenting how a parallel commitment scheme would work in a curve tree setup which allows easier security analysis when compared to Monero's proposed approach which uses squashed commitments.

Aaron (Sarang) is currently working on a vector commitment scheme using Bulletproofs+ that would make a curve tree implementation more efficient and also has applicability to Monero's implementation as well.

In July we attempted to do a modification to our Spark implementation that would have allowed us to re-use anonymity sets regardless if we went down the parallel or squashed commitment scheme. HashCloak through our security retainer with them identified a flaw in this modification and the only way to solve it introduces overhead. As a result we have decided to proceed without it especially since it seems we're most likely going down the parallel commitment route.

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.