Market Making, Development and Research March 2023 by reuben

Why?

This is the fifth 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 but we are still operating at a deficit.

Core team gets about ~16000 FIRO a month or around ~USD35,200. USD2.20/FIRO

Breakdown of Core Team Expenses

Core team expenses remain unchanged except with a slight increment to Anwar/Ajay as part of keeping in line with inflation (300 USD extra cost) and some additional miscellaneous research-related costs and a liquidity mining campaign for Pancakeswap using dminer.

Developer Pay (covers 4 developers Peter, Levon, Gevorg, Narek) 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.

Slow but steady progress on curve tree research is being made. Aaron did some work on Aura voting and attended a voting workshop which he lead which lead to some new avenues of research for Aura.

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 6,333 USD We engage Armada Labs (the team from Hummingbot) to run market making on three exchanges Binance (FIRO/BTC, FIRO/BUSD), Bittrex and Bitmart with my own personal inventory.

We also continue to fund a Hummingbot liquidity mining campaign that has boosted organic liquidity on Binance on FIRO/BTC and FIRO/BUSD pairs.

We are contractually obliged to provide market making to Bitmart as part of our agreement with them to list us. We maintain Bittrex/Bitmart support due to their US licenses. Our main market is Binance by a wide margin.

Misc Expenses We also spent 705.75 USD to cover Aaron's hotel and flight to Denver and entry fee to an e-voting workshop hosted by Delendum which Aaron lead. Thanks to Poramin for highlighting to us on this opportunity.

Dminer Campaign 2000 USD This is an experiment that we are working with Hummingbot to promote provision of DEX liquidity on Pancakeswap. While this is for BEP20-FIRO, there are still atomic swap options that allow it to be swapped for native FIRO and also encourages arbitrage with Binance that supports both. We see it as an onboarding mechanism to private FIRO and wish to utilize BNB Chain's DeFi capabilities and augment FIRO's position in it while we develop Spark Assets. This money goes entirely to the community who provide liquidity on PCS and none to Hummingbot or the core team.

Total: USD 52,538.75/month

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: USD17,338.75 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 a slight increment to 15,333 USD from last month's request of USD13,333 because of the additional dminer campaign. We will utilize some of our reserves to cover any shortfall.

Total requested: ~USD15,333/month in FIRO equivalent.

Breakdown:

Market Making: USD6,333.00 In the long run it might make sense for market making costs to not be borne by the core team to avoid any conflict of interest.

Decentralized Liquidity Mining USD2,000.00 Platform fees are waived for this period.

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: USD3,000 This covers the cost of one junior developer.

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.