First Quarter 2016 Dash Expense Report
https://dashtalk.org/threads/first-quarter-2016-expense-report.8691/
In an effort to provide greater transparency to the community on how proposal funds are being spent, we are providing the following financial report covering Q1 budget proposals and expenses.
The core team budget proposals for Q1 included the following:
– Core Team “Salary”
– Dash.org Reimbursement
– Liquidity providers
– Transform.PR
– Lamassu ATM Integration
– Satoshi Roundtable
– Public Awareness
Most of these budget items are pretty straightforward (e.g., reimbursements for expenses, defined contracts). However, we would like to provide more insight into each of these items. Daniel also provided valuable details on the Public Awareness budget – the only core team budget with significant spending discretion – which he manages.
There were also numerous community-sponsored budget proposals that were funded during the quarter. These included reimbursement for expenses for building and displaying the Dash soda vending machine at the The North American Bitcoin Conference, sponsorship of the Daily Decrypt, the WiFi Portal project, and interview sponsorships on JuanSGalt‘s Disruptek channel on YouTube. While the core team will only be reporting on the projects under its sponsorship, you can see that there were many other great efforts funded by the budget this quarter.
Core Team “Salary”
The core team is currently allocated 1,176 Dash per month for “salary”. I place “salary” in quotes because at current prices, this amount is little more than a token recognition of the work being done by the core team members, many of whom transitioned to full-time status in the last few months. During the quarter, these funds were used to recognize the contributions of 19 individuals that provided substantial support to core team initiatives. This budget is fully distributed every month.
Dash.org Reimbursement
This budget proposal was meant to run from December through March to reimburse eduffield (Evan), Minotaur (Daniel), and kot (Robert) for the purchase of the dash.org domain name late last year. The approved budget was for a total of 8,400 Dash spread over 4 months. The January through March payments distributed as expected, but due to an error, all December budgets were not paid. A new budget item this quarter replaces the missed December payment starting in April.
Liquidity Providers
The Liquidity Providers budget proposal funds the hosting of six wallets on the network – each operated by community members – which constantly mix coins. This provides users with much faster mixing times and a better user experience with our privacy features. The budget called for 140 Dash per month compensation for these community members. The funding address is controlled by yidakee (Tiago) – who administers the program – and distributed from there to the other community members providing the services. The liquidity provider proposal was voted out starting in March, so only January and February payments were made. The team of volunteers have continued to provide liquidity to the network despite the defunding of the proposal. Part of the reason it was defunded was due to the cost, as Dash’s value has appreciated so much in the last 6 months. We have resubmitted the Liquidity Provider funding request at a lower payment amount to regain support for this valuable service. If you have not already done so, please vote out the original Liquidity Providers proposal and cast your vote on the new v2 Liquidity Providers proposal.
Transform.PR
During Q1, we contracted public relations services through Transform.PR. The original intent was to have a three month contract with Transform.PR extending from January to March. The contract was denominated in USD at $6,000 / month. Funding was primarily to be provided through the Public Awareness budget, but a separate proposal of 1,100 Dash was approved beginning in January to supplement the costs. This was one of our major promotion initiatives in January 2016. The focus was on press release distribution and lobbying with the media to promote organic articles on Dash related topics. Unfortunately, the proposal was voted down before the January results were even reported, so only the first month was funded. Nonetheless, we saw a significant number of articles in a variety of publications during the month of January resulting from this proposal / contract.
Dash Increases Its Block Size as Founder Confirms Instantaneous Transactions
Dash Plans Integration into Lamassu ATMs with Bitcoin
A Conversation with Evan Duffield, Founder of Dash
Dash announces blocksize increase
Virtual Currency Developer Plans to Survive the ‘Death’ of Bitcoin
Dash Set to Take Cryptocurrency Ecosystem By Storm
Dash Founder: Cryptocurrency World Needs More Capacity Than Just Bitcoin
Dash To Become The First Alternative To Bitcoin Offered By The Lamassu ATM Project
Dash N ‘Drink: buy sodas from vending machines with this cryptocurrency
DASH Block Size Increase Reaches Consensus in Less Than 24 hours /Cryptocurrency news
Dash Block Size Increase to 2 MB Has Been Accepted
DASH Block Size Increase Reaches Consensus in Less Than 24 hours
Dash doubles block size
The North American Bitcoin Conference 2016: Day 1
Leapfrogging Bitcoin, Dash Adopts 2MB Block Sizes
Dash’s 2nd Birthday: We Are Complementary To Bitcoin, Not A Competitor
Dash Cryptocurrency Secures Trademark Rights, Moves to Increase Block Size to 2 MB
Lamassu ATM Integration
We have a support contract with Deginner to integrate Dash into the Lamassu ATM network. The contract with Deginner is denominated in Dash, consisting of 12 monthly payments of 610.26 Dash each. Although the final payment will be in December 2016, the contract actually provides 24 months of support through the end of 2017, including the integration of Dash into any future releases of Lamassu’s code. A first version of the software has been released by Deginner and a working demonstration video has been posted. Additional versions are already planned which will make integration on existing machines much easier for ATM operators. Payments for these services are paid directly to Deginner each month.
Satoshi Roundtable
Daniel and Evan attended the Satoshi Roundtable in January. A budget proposal of two months at 717.70 Dash per month was approved to reimburse Evan’s and Daniel’s cost of attendance. These two payments were completed as of the March payment cycle.
Public Awareness is the only budget item where the core team has significant discretion on how the monies are spent. Some of the information in this post has been published before. Daniel compiled it again here for the benefit of everyone having this information in one place, including the associated expenses. These are the major components of the Public Awareness spending during the quarter:
- 1) Public Relations. As stated earlier, we contracted public relations services with Transform.PR. The contribution from the Public Awareness budget consisted of 675.15 DASH.
- 2) TNABC. Another major initiative we had for January was our participation in The North American Bitcoin Conference. Funding for the event was primarily provided in the November budget, which covered Evan’s and Daniel’s flight and hotel costs. However, we had some promotional expenses that were covered from the public-awareness budget and additional attendance costs.
b) Dash Stickers: 77.43 DASH
c) Tungfa Flight Reimbursement (HK-MIA) + Hotel: $1371.00 USD + $600 USD
- 3) 8BTC. We continued our partnership with 8BTC for Chinese PR services. Final payment of our three month agreement with 8BTC. Investment: 4 BTC.
Original Project Description from the 2015 Q4 report:
“We contracted a partnership with Chinese PR service that works with 8BTC the number 1 Chinese forum and media site for 4BTC per month, of which we have already paid the first month. This has been a breakthrough for us in China and has provided a way better sense of direction. Before we went into this program the Dash section in 8BTC was still under the Darkcoin brand, had no new content and very little attention. As a result of this program the Dash section was updated, everything related to Darkcoin was converted to Dash and they have provided a lot of guidance in our efforts to reach the Chinese audience. We also started translating and publishing any articles we got on the West campaign into 8BTC we even got our Chinese version of the video to be on an article on the front page of 8BTC. Please check for details: www.8BTC.com/dash”
- 4) PR and Advertising Campaign. After our relationship with the PR firm had been terminated, we ran a comprehensive PR and Advertising campaign internally. Including: Banner advertisements in different websites, International article translation and publication, podcast sponsorships and interviews.
a) CryptoMediaHub.com 3.6846 BTC
b) BTCMedia.org 13.273083 BTC
c) International Sites 2.4424 BTCActivities:
-
- http://bitcoinnewsindo.com/software-mesin-penjual-otomatis-dash-open-source-ix/
- http://bitcoinnewses.com/bitcoinesp…o-abierto-para-maquinas-expendedoras-dash-ix/
- http://bitcoinnewses.com/bitcoinespanol/dash-2016-hoja-de-ruta/
- http://www.bitcoinnews.com.br/bitco…nda-satoshi-roundtable-evento-crypto-privado/
- http://www.bitcoinnews.com.br/bitco…a-de-mais-capacidade-do-que-apenas-o-bitcoin/
- http://bitcoinnewsindo.com/software-mesin-penjual-otomatis-dash-open-source-ix/
- http://bitcoinnewsarabia.com/خريطة-طريق-dash-لعام-2016/
https://soundcloud.com/sovereignbtc/dan-diaz-dash-finalIV) The Tatiana Show with Daniel Diaz:
https://liberty.me/live/the-tatiana-show-dash-digital-currency/
Printed Magazine:
Dash Article + participation in poster of industry leaders. This magazine is distributed to 40,000+ issues printed quarterly, 200k readers. Dash appears in the current issue:
https://issuu.com/ybitcoin/docs/ybitcoinmagazine?e=10006647/34143437
https://ybitcoin.com/poster/
- 5) Anarchapulco. Dash participation at Anarchapulco with a keynote presentation by Juan S. Galt. There was actually a proposal to sponsor Anarchapulco which was not funded because of late submittal. The desire of the community was clear to sponsor, however, so the sponsorship was paid out of the Public Awareness budget. 140 Dash.
- 6) Translation Services. As part of the maintenance of the different international social media outlets, we run a translation tip jar. 40 Dash.
- 7) FIAT Gateways projects. Starting in late March, we communicated our intent to redirect Public Awareness funding toward development activities, and a proposal in the April budget made our recommendation official. Given the need to establish better FIAT gateway infrastructure, a new partnership was established with existing crypto companies to develop and implement open source tools for Dash that will facilitate FIAT access to users and businesses looking to implement services in the Dash ecosystem. Investment in Q1 was 1900 Dash. More details about this project: https://dashtalk.org/threads/prioritization-of-fiat-gateways.8457/
- 8) BALANCE. There is a balance of 10.02 BTC from Q1 that will be directed towards a new Chinese PR campaign with 8BTC and coordinated by our Chinese ambassadors.
These are the exact numbers, but since different initiatives come denominated in different currencies and were transacted at different times the total value is difficult to value precisely. With the intent to give an approximate overall value I am going to use an average rate of 4 USD / Dash and 400 USD / BTC to be conservative.
That would give us a total approximate value of $26,799.32 USD for the Public Awareness initiatives.
We feel very pleased with the results in terms of growth of awareness during Q1 2016. We have seen the Dash project consolidate and many non-core team projects emerge from the governance system which shows the network is maturing. At this point in time the core team is focusing more on development and building access gateway infrastructure and there is now a great group of community volunteers leading the way in the PR and marketing area, although some smaller initiatives like our Chinese promotion will continue.
Questions / Comments:
We are working hard to provide the community with value and transparency to a greater extent than other crypto currencies. If you have questions, concerns, or congratulations about the budgets, feel free to reach out to me, or post comments publicly here. We are eager to hear feedback and ideas. Thanks!
Ryan Taylor
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