Market Making, Development and Research by reuben

Why?

In the depth of the bear market, the core team is operating at a deficit. While we do have some reserves, we do not want to be left in too vulnerable a position should there is a protracted bear market.

Given market uncertainty, we are requesting support from the Community Fund Committee to supplement some costs that we would have otherwise been forced to cut off to preserve our runway.

The core team would like to preserve the talent and the long standing relationships we have built to continue building FIRO.

Dev team gets about ~16000 FIRO a month or around ~USD36,000.

Breakdown of Core Team Expenses

Developer Pay (covers 4 developers) 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. Currently the research team is also assisting with the Spark audit in addition to their research tasks.

Admin/Support/Management (including Reuben) 8700 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 engaged Armada Labs (the team from Hummingbot) to run market making on three exchanges Binance (FIRO/BTC, FIRO/BUSD), Bittrex and Bitmart.

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.

Total: USD 49,533/month

As you can see this excludes any sort of marketing or unexpected costs and we are relatively lean.

Deficit: USD13,533 a month.

How much?

We are requesting the FIRO equivalent of the following

Total requested: ~USD13,333/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.

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.