Thanks for the comment, @stakefish_gov. I’ll address it point by point.
- The answer to this depends on why you think that development funding should come from the ICF- because they can do a better job allocating funding than the community pool can, or because they have a lot of money? They’ve announced that they plan to put $3.5M in the community pool, and I applaud this. Personally I’d love to see a lot more than that put in the community pool by both the ICF and AiB, and I think that the Hub taking core development into its own hands is a good way show that it’s time to make that happen.
- We work together very closely, which is why we combined our proposals. That being said, we will present separate quarterly reports to the oversight committee, are graded separately, draw from separate vesting wallets, and our funding can be terminated separately. What are your specific concerns?
- We have one unified team that takes on many aspects of maintenance, support, production operations, and R&D on the Hub’s core offerings. That is a large scope. In my experience, trying to develop a product with many sub $1m grants ends up being more expensive, as shown by the grant-based Hub program that the ICF had in 2022 and the years before. Each one might be easy to say “yes” to, but you end up with more overhead, a scattershot approach, and less follow-through*
- In an ideal world, there would be some completely on-chain way to do this with no multisig, but technology (not to mention the liquidity) is not quite there yet. If the Binary Builders DRIP proposal was in production, we would be using that, but right now the multisig is the most practical solution. I’m not aware of any tax implications related to this, and I have participated in this type of operation myself in the past without any tax implications, but each of the multisig participants is responsible for their own tax reporting.
- Just to get it out of the way, according to CoinMarketCap and CoinGecko, ATOM’s daily trading volume averages at $50-$100M (today it’s around $300M). The $4M liquidation is not likely to make a big impact. Is it bad optically? I don’t think so. We can’t run a professional dev team where we might have to cut people’s salaries in half or fire half the team depending on what the crypto markets are doing any given quarter. Doing a new funding prop every quarter would be a lot of uncertainty and overhead.
Ultimately, this funding prop is a referendum on one thing: Would you like the current Hub team to continue into 2024? If it does not pass, we may have to consider winding down.
*Just a caveat on my opinion of grant programs- They have a very important place. Grant programs can bring in devs, bring in new ideas, and generate excitement in the space. For example, I think that AADAO’s program has been valuable this year, and built excitement and momentum around the Hub. I just don’t think that a grants program can substitute for a focused core team.