Hey everyone!
Sorry about the delay.
We support a 12 month cadence and fully accept the roadmap co-development and quarterly update requirements.
In terms of payment, we have spent some time forecasting the next 12 months. We are currently being paid 3.33% of RPL inflation to develop and innovate the protocol. As many have pointed out we maintain a very tight team.
There are reasons why we keep the team lean:
- Funding is a consideration, we like to be long term sustainable
- Bear markets happen
- We avoid the typical tech expansion and inevitable downsizing because it is a waste of talent and money (acquisition and onboarding costs)
- Small experienced teams tend to outperform
- We want to leave room for the DAO to grow and not have the team do everything
That said, we have committed to grow the team by 3 headcount this year:
- Ecosystem Lead - actively manage ecosystem relationships to help drive adoption of Rocket Pool
- Senior Software Developer - expand our development capacity to deliver more
- Junior Software Developer
Additionally, the team shoulder a number of other operational costs these include:
- Chainlink oracle costs
- Cloud costs for infrastructure
- Smart contract audits
- Bug bounties
At current funding and RPL market rate, our additional headcount puts us running at a significant loss. This we can absorb, for now, due to cash flow management but an increase in funding would mean we break-even. As the wider market conditions improve it would also allow us to expand further.
We are requesting an increase to 5% of RPL inflation + our oDAO payments (that are progressively reducing). We believe this rate is still an extremely good deal for the protocol but gives us the ability to maintain our capacity and grow as the market improves.
Please let me know your thoughts