Proposal Details

Dash Incubator Rion 2023 Q3

Dash Incubator Rion 2023 Q1

Proposal to fund the Dash Incubator reserve administered by Rion Gull, Dash Incubator Lead Strategist.

Summary

Dash Incubator has submitted three proposals this quarter:

  1.  This proposal requesting 800 DASH/month
  2.  Ash's proposal??? requesting 200 DASH/month (officially withdrawn - see July 17th update below)
  3.  Tim's proposal??? requesting 150 DASH/month ???(officially withdrawn - see July 17th update below)???

In contrast to our previous 2023 Q2 proposal and all Incubator proposals before that, this quarter we are submitting multiple proposals.  All Incubator funds are still controlled exclusively by the lead strategist, who is tasked to ensure all transactions follow Incubator rules.

July 17th update:  

Lysergic's proposal to ???"Divert Incubator Funds to DCG" gives MNOs the option to send Incubator-requested funding to DCG instead.  Of course this puts Incubator's future in serious jeopardy, but as explained in the final 13 minutes of Incubator Weekly today, pursuing the controversial diversion proposal also puts DCG at risk of getting even less funding.  This is because mutually exclusive proposals usually end up with many NO votes, which easily keeps them outside of Dash's difficult passing criteria.

To help avoid this likely fate, Sam (from DCG) and I agreed on an alternative "middle ground" option for MNOs to consider:  DCG will request (or has already requested, depending on when you read this) 650 DASH in their typical supplemental proposal this month.  This gives MNOs an uncontroversial option to pass that proposal (giving DCG more additional funding) while also supporting this Incubator proposal.  Ash and Tim have both agreed that is a sensible alternative to suggest to MNOs, as they can continue work with their respective reserves for at least this quarter with small adjustments.

Of course MNOs have all possible funding options that the superblock allows.  We just wanted to give a more sensible option that allows continued support for both organizations.

1 Incubator Updates

Near the end of last quarter Incubator strategists collectively approved an internal rule change that affects how we do Incubator proposals.  Formerly, strategists would submit internal proposals??? to request budgets.  The strategic committee would approve or reject the lead strategist's budget request from the general reserve, and the lead strategist would approve or reject budget requests from each strategist.  We decided that it would be more effective and efficient to have each strategist request and receive budgets from MNOs and the superblock directly.  These, and other rule changes are detailed in the difference between our v3 and v4 rules???.  

Our Incubator WEEKLY video series continues to air every Monday.  The show highlights projects we're working on in the Incubator, and as of this writing includes 22 shows.  The first or second Monday of each new quarter is a report of what we've allocated rewards to throughout the previous quarter.  Below is our 2023 Q2 Quarterly Report, which aired earlier this month. 



The quarterly report covers much of the information given in these proposals, so it's a good supplement or ???even substitute to this written text.

Figure 1 below shows Incubator's high-level funding rates.  The blue series is our superblock requests.  The red series shows rewards paid to incubator contributors, averaged into monthly rates for each quarter.

https://github.com/dashincubator/proposals/blob/main/dash-incubator-2023-q3/figure1-rates-over-time.png?raw=true
Figure 1 - Reward and request rates over time

2 Project Updates and Outlook

The incubator distributed 3,396.4 DASH in rewards to 23 different projects over the past quarter (2023 Q2). 

Now that we are submitting separate proposals for each strategist, this section will highlight only my own (Rion's) projects.

https://github.com/dashincubator/proposals/blob/main/dash-incubator-2023-q3/figure2-reward-allocation-rion.png?raw=true
Figure 2 - Reward allocation

The following videos cover projects that I reported on through Incubator Weekly:


In the coming quarter I plan to do the following:

  • Continue work on payment and merchant tooling.
  • Continue work on Dash Improvement Proposals (DIPs).
  • Continue work on our web Wallet SDK and UI.
  • Continue work on our JavaScript CoinJoin SDK.
  • Continue work on supporting Electrum (pending developer availability)
  • Help fund a hackathon for a major web2 project (was scheduled last quarter, but the event was delayed).
  • Finish other lower-priority projects (e.g. DashPay thumbnail image server, GitHub migration, Trello clean up, etc).

3 Schedule and Budgeting

???This proposal continues our typical 3-month funding proposal cadence, now with one proposal for each of our Incubator strategists.

Figure 3 below breaks down this budget planning for the following quarter (3 months shown in the table).  I'm including this table and a detailed explanation of it to help everyone understand our new (Incubator rules v4) budgeting and award system.  This table can always be accessed in our Accounting spreadsheet.

https://github.com/dashincubator/proposals/blob/main/dash-incubator-2023-q3/figure3-reserve-planning.png/?raw=true
Figure 3 - Strategist reserve planning (updated July 17) 

Some notes from the figure:

  • Column A indicates the strategist and month for the upcoming three months of budget requests.
  • Column B shows the current reserves in each strategist reserve, along with the total as of the screenshot in cell B5.
  • Column C shows each strategist's budget request, along with the total in rows 5, 11, and 17.
  • Column D shows each strategist's projected output (rewards paid to Incubator contributors).
  • Column E shows the maximum base commission that strategists can claim (10% of the MNO-approved budget).
  • Column F shows the maximum output commission that strategists can claim (20% of strategist-approved tasks, shared with admins if used for certain projects).
  • Column G is the sum of E and F, representing the total commission strategists can earn (25% of MNO-approved budget maximum over time).
  • Column H is column C less columns D and G, representing the surplus or deficit of each reserve.
  • Column I is the sum of E and L, representing the projected end-of-month balance.
  • Column J is the projected buffer for each reserve assuming subsequent funding continues.
  • Column K is the projected buffer for each reserve assuming no continued funding (bounties paid from reserves alone).
According to the above assumptions and calculations, by the end of the quarter we expect to have the following buffers:

  • 0.9 month buffer for the Incubator overall (down from 2.7 months from last quarter)
  • 1.2 month buffer for my strategic reserve (down from 2.2 months from last quarter)
I'd like to raise my buffer to 6 months over time, but this will be difficult given our current superblock constraints.  If Dash does not appreciate in value I'll need to curtail development or explore alternatives for Incubator funding.

Terms and Closing

All operations of the Incubator funded by this proposal are subject to our current Rules.  This proposal forms a part of our Network Contract with Dash.  Our rules are always subject to and defer to MNO voting. 

Thank you, masternode voters, for your support!  As always, I'm very excited about this quarter and what we will accomplish.

Respectfully,

Rion

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