Proposal “DCG-SUPPLEMENTAL-DEC22“ (Closed)Back

Title:Dash Core Group December Supplemental Funding Proposal
Owner:quantumexplorer
One-time payment: 722 DASH (21140 USD)
Completed payments: no payments occurred yet (1 month remaining)
Payment start/end: 2022-12-11 / 2023-01-10 (added on 2022-12-16)
Votes: 438 Yes / 53 No / 38 Abstain

Proposal description

Dash Core Group December 26th Supplemental Funding Proposal

DCG already submitted 2 funding proposals for the budget cycle that pays out December 26th. This is a supplemental proposal that will fund Dash Core Group with an additional 722 Dash:
1) DCG Compensation: 2,296 Dash per month (currently in month 1/3)
2) DCG Infrastructure: 459 Dash (currently in month 2/2)
3) DCG Compensation Supplemental: 722 Dash (currently in month 1/1)

What does this specific proposal fund?

Assuming DCG’s current compensation proposal passes, with the price of Dash at $45, our funding for compensation will represent a very significant gap from our actual compensation expense. This proposal will look to reduce some of the gap between our compensation revenue and our compensation expense.

Did DCG reduce staff?

Six months ago we reduced our compensated team size by about 15%, lowering our break-even price from ~$120/Dash to ~$103/Dash. It has since lowered to ~$93/Dash due to additional departures and cost cutting measures. Our compensation reserve now sits slightly under 5 months.

Do you plan on more layoffs in the near future?

Dash Core Group is now mostly a technical organization with most of our business development and marketing staff having exited the project. The remaining staff is essential to us functioning at a high level. We have no plans to revisit further reducing our staffing in the next month.

How much of an impact do the supplemental proposals have?

A big impact. The supplemental proposals leave us in a much better state to hold off being forced to cut vital employees as the bear market lasts longer.

Didn’t DCG previously communicate they wouldn’t request over 60% of the total proposal system budget?

Yes. In the past, Ryan Taylor, previously CEO of Dash Core Group, made a commitment to the Dash network that DCG’s monthly ask would never exceed 60% of the total budget. This was stated after there was significant backlash against DCG requesting funding for tax-related expenses in late 2018, which caused competing proposals to be pushed off the funding list. In this cycle, the same situation is not present; no other proposals would be negatively affected by this request for supplemental funds. It therefore seems to be in the best interest of the project to remove the self-imposed 60% limit, as not doing so would effectively hurt us by having to let go of people that are providing value to the project.

Samuel Westrich (Quantum Explorer) had reached out to the Dash Trust Protectors four months ago and asked whether they would support DCG making a proposal for the rest of the available treasury this month. All responses from the Trust Protectors had come back with support for the supplemental proposal. Given this indication of support, we decided to move forward and have masternode owners vote on these supplemental proposals every month for unused treasury funds.We will continue making such supplemental proposals in the case of unused treasury funds - waiting around one week before the end of each cycle to leave time for other submissions.

If you have any questions, please direct them to @quantumexplorer at dashcentral to ensure we are notified of your request.

Requested funding is as follows for the December 26th superblock:
  • 721 Dash ($32,445 USD @ $45 per Dash)
  •     1 Dash Proposal fee reimbursement
Total: 722 Dash

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Discussion: Should we fund this proposal?

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1 point,1 year ago
These 3 are mine. Today devs has done a good job, I thought it needs to be rewarded somehow.
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2 points,1 year ago
Thanks, but this proposal is for last month, it's a bug/issue that it's on dashcentral right now. I think it automatically is removed on the website at the middle of the month.
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1 point,1 year ago
If there is one good thing about this supplemental proposal not passing it is to prove to all the naysayers that DCG does not control the process. DCG is here and does its best to develop our project for our users and our community but in the end cold hard votes decide funding and while we might be closely aligned with some whales that together have some hundred votes, we do not have nearly enough to pass proposals outright.

A lot of things went just slightly wrong here that culminated in this proposal not passing. (It ending in the middle of the night the week of Xmas - being posted 6 days before the cycle end - big voting early on in the cycle - some people being unhappy/annoyed with DCG delivery speed). We are not going to read too much into it.

These supplemental proposals are just here to extend our reserves as much as possible in the event of a long bear market. With our reserves dwindling we are further than the half way point on using up those reserves.

The way we all together succeed is not by DCG doing slightly more to make these proposals pass. The way we succeed is by staying on mission, continuing to innovate, retaking the title of the most innovative crypto project and delivering value to our users that can not be found elsewhere.

2023 is looking up to becoming the most interesting year for this project since 2017 and I'm very happy that we are going to share it together. Merry Xmas and happy holidays to all! - QE
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1 point,1 year ago
You mean after taking 60% of the treasury every month you do not feel any loss for taking more. How nice of you.

For every dash you take, you deny others the opportunity. OTOH, if there are no significant proposals coming in except your own... might as well drop the smoke and mirrors and claim the whole 10% reward as your own.
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-1 point,1 year ago
Thank you for the post and I just want to say, I think we already took back the crown of "most innovative crypto project when we released instantsend by default. We were already a top candidate with masternodes and masternode governance (two innovations that, to this day, other coins cannot match with their own architectures and funding styles, like flipstarter monero's CCS, etc.) Platform looks to transform Dash into something else entirely.

Thanks once again for all the hardwork you and DCG have provided, and for this bit of hoilday cheer. Enjoy the break (I hope you're taking one)!
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1 point,1 year ago
If you truly believe that DCG does not control the budget, then I assume you will support the below proposal....

"All DCG board members must disclose personal dash masternode holdings"

https://www.dash.org/forum/threads/pre-proposal-all-dcg-board-members-must-disclose-peronal-dash-masternode-holdings.53454/
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0 points,1 year ago
Sadly this proposal seems to not have passed by 4 votes.
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3 points,1 year ago
4 is the magic number for this budget cycle.
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-3 points,1 year ago
Sam, I suggest you refile this proposal again this month. It came late in the last cycle.
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0 points,1 year ago
Yes, I'm not reading too deep into the reason it didn't pass, there are a lot of small things that added up. We will continue making mop up proposals around 7-8 days before the voting cycle end.
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2 points,1 year ago
Consider to submit all future supplemental funding proposals at least 9 or 10 days prior to voting deadline,
given the historically low voting adherence and the lameass voter behavior in general.
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1 point,1 year ago
The reason QE submits it late in the proposal cycle is that in a previous funding cycle, he submitted it earlier, and then another person or group submitted a proposal after that. I don't recall who it was exactly, but let's say it was Bob. For those that came to look at that list of proposals in the last week, it looked like (if you didn't pay close attention to when the props were submitted) DCG gave no regard to Bob's proposal and just bumped him off.

Of course, that's not what happened, but DCG was criticized for it anyway. And since QE has made heroic efforts to produce a better and more informed relationship with the MN community, he agreed to submit future supplemental proposals later in the cycle. Given the history, that only makes sense.

You can't have it both ways, and I'm sure QE feels like no matter what he does, he still gets criticized for it.

Ok ladies and gentlemen, let's get this thing pushed over the top so Sam can stop worrying about it. We got work to do. I am voting yes, and with enthusiasm.

Solarguy, MNO, TP, OD, CCABW (Chief Cook And Bottle Washer)
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3 points,1 year ago
It was Crowdnode.
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1 point,1 year ago
Voting NO on this mop up proposal. These proposals have become quite the joke recently! This proposal requests 2.8 Dash over the available budget, so that means it assumes other proposals cannot pass, including some decision proposals! If this proposal passes, then DCG will be awarded a staggering 75% of the available budget! Where is the value? This is a bear market, control yourselves! You can ask for more when we are back in the bull market and price is over $200 not now. It's a NO from me.
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-1 point,1 year ago
The value is, everybody and his dog wants to get Evolution-Platform out the door. All hands on deck. Except you apparently. I would far prefer that Platform was launched and any and all the kinks worked out _before_ the next bull run. Your mileage may vary.

voting yes, solarguy
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1 point,1 year ago
The value comes from a professional development team working their asses off to deliver value to the network. We have massive levels of development going on compared to our dev team size: you can check out our repos here: https://github.com/dashpay. Most of them are indeed for Platform and Platform is coming out very soon. GroveDB and Tenderdash are ready for testing. The protocol side will be feature complete and ready for testing within weeks.

You are making it sound like I have the audacity to try to keep development of the project ongoing with minimal setbacks.

So I ask you this. What do you think will happen if we are forced to lay off a third to half of the devs in the entire Dash project? Especially when they are good devs?

We are underfunded compared to our costs.
We are smaller than most other dev teams.
Our devs make less than most projects in the crypto space.
I am probably one of the least paid CTOs of any top 100 project as well.

Many including me are doing this out of passion. But there's a reality, most of our devs have families to support and that means they need compensation for their work. If we don't get enough money into DCG we will be forced by basically running out of money to let a size-able amount of people go.

As for requesting 2.8 Dash above the available budget. We are taking into account that current proposals with 0 to negative 400 absolute votes are not going to pass. I think that that's a pretty fair assumption.
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-3 points,1 year ago
Lysergic has always used these kinds of inflection points to attack and tarnish the reputation of DAOs and is likely a paid infiltrator who bought up masternodes before Dash's price rose in 2017 as a 'just in case' to serve as a secret backstab weapon for Dash's competition. This isn't a personal accusation, I have recorded and argued against similarly fudish accusations against solid DAO's working for Dash that came from Lysergic in the past, especially in regards to Dash's adoption in Venezuela. Its clear that he's a bad actor. Eventually, Dash will have to deal with this cabal of anti-Dash MNOs...
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1 point,1 year ago
Nonsense, I just think DCG is being a bit too greedy here and not actually delivering enough value to justify such a steep ask, instead I would like to see us spend less in the bear markets and better manage the price. I am happy for them to build a reserve in the good times. Also, they still have 6 months runway here, to date, they've felt no pain, no one has taken a paycut, no one's been stiffed, meanwhile in the traditional Silicon Valley companies they are letting staff go all over the place. It wouldn't be the worst if we economised during this time. We can grow out when the market improves.
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0 points,1 year ago
Not true... Our break even price used to be 150$/Dash, now it's around 90$/Dash. We did lay off people before July. We did it early on to extend the time we had as much as possible.

We aren't laying anyone else off, because everyone is very important and working their ass off. How do you have a successful project if you lay off the good people?

When you say this is a steep ask did you look at other big projects and see what they are spending? Or is it just that you want us to do more with 5x less?

We now have less than 5 months of runway, because we have the supplementals. If we had never made them we would have around 4 months.

Reality is that if more than a few people were to be let go it would have devastating effects on our ability to deliver.
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2 points,1 year ago
To be honest i am not that impressed with DCG ability to deliver anyways. For many many months you were personally asked the question by several Dash community members if Dash Platform is still on schedule to be launched end of this year on Dash Mainnet, and for many many months we hear this is still the case (with the clarification that the actual activation could take a few months, due to the hard fork with v19).

Now the story changed during the last Dash Platform Product Update that Dash Platform will only be feature complete (codewise) on Testnet end of this year, but that Dash Platform still needs 2 more months of testing on Testnet.

If you already knew you wanted to reserve two additional months for testing Dash Platform on Testnet, then why constantly say to those Dash community members that Dash Platform will indeed be ready for launch on Dash Mainnet end of this year ? (to be fully activated some time later due to the hard fork)

The way i see it, the latest Dash Platform Product Update only confirmed just another delay of two months. Not all that unexpected, and not all that new to us either.

I think these kind of DCG supplemental budget requests (which so far have all been granted), does nothing to DCG ability to launch Dash Platform on time. They have not so far....
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1 point,1 year ago
And I believe without any external audit, which DCG previously promised. Almost forgot, Sam will not be held responsible for what others said. When he steps down, sooner or later, the next person will give the same lame statement.
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1 point,1 year ago
Personally i don't mind DCG taking two additional months for internal testing, since the external security audit of Dash Platform has been scrapped. But it does not allign with your earlier statements, with regards to release of Dash Platform end of this year on Dash Mainnet.
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-1 point,1 year ago
You're an idiot. The only reason to refuse funding DCG would be due to GROSS incompetence or bad acting. Neither of which is even hinted at here. It is impossible to know when a software project will be ready. Software takes time and almost always more time than you think.

But more importantly, your reasoning is BACKWARDS, likely as a deliberate attack against the DAO, as tricking people using illogical arguments means that the result of them falling for your trickery is their fault and not yours. This is useful as a guilt-free weapon, but it also exposes the motivations of the one who uses such a technique as it has no other purpose than being a weapon.

If the price is low, and Platform is "delayed" as you say, then all the more reason to make sure that DCG is fully funded! We trust our core team, this is their determination of need and it is OUR JOB to respond affirmatively in the abscence of incompetence or fraud. NOTHING THAT YOU'RE SAYING IS LOGICAL OR MAKES SENSE except on the very surface (again, deflection shield so you can pretend to be sincere).
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1 point,1 year ago
Thanks. Working about 16 hours a day recently. It's nice to know that some people appreciate it.
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-1 point,1 year ago
Definitely. I know the feeling to be slandered and underappreciated despite all your hard work and transparency and openness. Thank you for all you do for the network, I know its not an easy job.
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-2 points,1 year ago
Thanks QE, it does not go unnoticed. Once platform is up and running, maybe I will put a proposal up for a one month, all expense paid vacation for you. No joke, you deserve it. You have put a jillion hours in on Platform in the last year.

solar
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-2 points,1 year ago
As noted by QE, this is factually incorrect. DCG _substantially_ reduced the burn rate by laying off staff.

Solarguy, still voting yes, and with enthusiasm. Let's git-er-done finally.
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-2 points,1 year ago
>Nonsense, I just think DCG is being a bit too greedy here

What a stupid thing to say. How can you call my comment nonsense when this garbage is the next thing out of your mouth? DCG IS THE CORE TEAM OF THE COIN YOU IDIOT! If we don't pay them they'll go elsewhere. I've remained silent for a while now just to show others what the goal of you and those like you who post FUD all the time is.

We can see that our ecosystem is smaller, has fewer participants and less adoption than in the past. While, just as I alleged, you and others like you continue to use deflection-shield-FUDing. Which is a tactic where you hide behind deflection shields like "Its for the budget! They're being greedy!" etc. to justify WHY YOU'RE DESTROYING OUR COMMUNITIES AND ADOPTION WITH LIES.

You have provided large amounts of evidence that you have negative motives towards the network and attack our DAOs out of conflict of interest. Which means you should be branded as an enemy of the DAO and stripped of your position.
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0 points,1 year ago
Voting yes. It would be silly to stop support for theses devs just some weeks before release of Platform.
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1 point,1 year ago
Make that a few months. At least two additional months of testing after Dash Platform code-wise gets feature-complete (hopefully end of this year). Then launch to Mainnet and then another few months, because of the hard fork. So i guess four more months to go.
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-2 points,1 year ago
Which is what you and all the clock watchers finally wanted after all this time. An end date on MVP. We finally know where and when the finishing line is. Cheer up!
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-1 point,1 year ago
Voting yes.
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-1 point,1 year ago
How are you supposed to lead DCG, if you are not in Phoenix (AZ)?
Are we still paying the expensive rent for the Phoenix offices, and who is using the rooms right now?
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5 points,1 year ago
There is no one currently in Phoenix, so I'm not sure why I should be.
We have not been paying for Phoenix office space for years and I'm pretty sure that that was it's own proposal (or at least it wasn't coming for compensation proposal).

Our work force is completely remote and quite spread out around the world. We use various tools and routine calls to keep in constant contact.
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0 points,1 year ago
Agile development is the way most teams are working these days, and this is very amenable to calls over Teams, and bimonthly sprints. Glad to see best practices are being maintained by DCG's technical staff, which I know you're at the top of the food chain of. So, as a technical MNO to the CTO of DCG, I want to say that I think you're doing a fantastic job in leading the technical aspect of the Dash Core team.

From watching the sprints/platform updates, I can easily compare to the best practices I know from my time as software engineer and see that you and your team are exercising and utilizing the industry best practices that make modern development work.

I am constantly looking for trolls, infiltrators, flaws in the project, flaws in the rationales behind why we do what we do (whether its long term with platform, or how we vote on proposals), and while I often have left the technical side of this to those more technically inclined in this field of expertise (I'm not involved in cryptocurrencies, cryptography, or these areas of computer science), I do still compare what I know from the industry to what I'm seeing here at Dash (and other coins like BCH, Nano, Decred and the like). Both for the Core Team and incubator. *Spoiler Alert (and please do verify this for yourselves, I implore you)* Dash is the best.

And so I can say wholeheartedly that under both your and Ryan Taylor's watches, I have always been pleased with the technical acumen and direction of this project and truly appreciate being a part of this historic event (taking the crown as best cryptocurrency).

Thank you once again for your service, both quantumexplorer and DCG staff! Happy Holidays to you all!
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1 point,1 year ago
why is DCG paying people in fiat?
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