Welcome!

This is a cross-post from the Dash Forum

This proposal funds the Dash Core Team for the month of May - including all developers, administrative, and support staff - at market rates for base pay, excluding benefits or bonuses.

Back in January, the core team proposed - and the network approved - a proposal to fund an HR firm to assess our HR processes and help us transition to a sustainable organization. The highest priority items in the scope of work were role definitions, and determining the market rate for those positions, along with a plan to transition to market rates for our full-time employees as funds became available. You can view the proposal here: https://www.dash.org/forum/threads/proposal-admin-hr-consult.12870/

As of this morning, that effort is now complete, and we have finalized market rates for each of the roles in the organization, including the new positions created and approved in the April budget. As we are still ramping up the team with the new positions, and some positions were filled below budget, we are requesting significantly less budget for the May period than the previously-disclosed projected run-rate.

One of the primary reasons for making a transition to market rates was to enable those working for the project to continue to do so continuously, and also to enable us to attract and retain new talent to continue scaling our operations. We simply could not continue bringing on new resources at market rates without first addressing the significant gap to fair pay for existing team members - the team that helped get us where we are today. We have hired a significant number of new contractors since the April budget was approved. In fact, full-time contractors with start dates in April or May total 12 people so far (all within the development area), with additional recruiting kicking off in other areas.

Why one comprehensive proposal for the existing team?

Core team salary proposals have been highly supported by the network. In fact, the least-supported of these proposals typically receives only ~2% "no" votes among the votes cast. Continuing to break out individual budgets is time-consuming, costs additional resources (proposal costs), and seems to add little value given the current level of support for these expenses. If in the future more than 10% of the votes cast for core team salary are "no", I can solicit feedback on what the network would like separately voted upon, and attempt to provide the requested additional granularity in future budget cycles.

Requested funding is as follows for the May 5th budget cycle:

• 2,697.83 Dash for core team salaries ($196,817 USD @ $72.954 per Dash based on April 25th average rate at https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/price-dash.html)
• 5.00 Dash proposal reimbursement

Total: 2,702.83 Dash

Note: Should any funding remain, we will apply it toward future core team salary expenses.