Welcome!

Dash Core Group August 27th Funding Proposals
DCG is submitting 2 funding proposals for the budget cycle that pays out August 27th:
1) DCG Compensation: 2,423 Dash per month (currently in month 1/3)
2) DCG Infrastructure: 543 Dash (currently in month 1/2)

What does this specific proposal fund?
This multi-month proposal funds Dash Core Group's ongoing infrastructure costs and phase 1 of a security audit for the Dash Network Core Protocol. We detail these costs in the following “Infrastructure Cost Details” and “Security Audit Details” subheadings.

Infrastructure Cost Details
The tools and services to be covered by this proposal are critical for the DCG developers and other staff to work productively. It also includes hosting for externally-facing services including the website, forum, testnet, devnets, etc.

The last time funding was requested for the Dash Core Group’s infrastructure budget was in November 2020. 

Our current infrastructure costs average $20,000/month - this includes infrastructure, software licenses, and tools and applications used by DCG. This proposal, if paid out at the current exchange rate of $183 / Dash over the next budget cycle, should provide sufficient funding for 5 months of infrastructure costs.

These funds are for the following services:

• Cloud computing services (for hosting ~150 testnet and devnet servers, insight API, websites, forum, etc.) with AWS, DigitalOcean 
  
• Software development tools, licenses and applications (including continuous integration builds)
  
• Security applications (password managers, VPN services and custodial wallets)
  
• Infrastructure monitoring tools
  
• Service desk licenses
  
• Accounting, finance and expense reimbursement software subscriptions
  
• Google Suite (includes email hosting, calendar, document management, video conferencing, and a number of other productivity tools)
  
• Video-conferencing services for streaming purposes (Zoom)
  
• Collaboration tools such as Atlassian and Slack that collectively constitute the DCG “workplace”
  
• HR systems, recruitment systems and recruitment sites (this significantly increased monthly cost of operations recently)
  

The expenses for cloud computing instances constitute the largest portion of our infrastructure costs. These costs run approximately $11,000 per month. This includes cloud computing services for Dash Platform’s presence on testnet.

We continually review all of our infrastructure costs with the goal of only paying for what we need.  Over the recent 6 months our infrastructure costs have increased due to:

1. Increased demand from platform team for testnet and devnet servers (permanent increase until platform mainnet)
   
2. Expansion of number of staff which leads to an increase in tools and licensing costs (permanent increase)
   
3. Recent implementation of recruitment tools and use of recruitment websites (temporary increase in costs)
   

Overall, we anticipate our infrastructure costs to continue to average in the $15,000 to $20,000 monthly range.

Security Audit Details
Dash has an incredible set of features that offer the potential to significantly improve the user experience, offering fast, secure, scalable, and inexpensive transaction processing.  However, some of these features can only benefit users if they are widely supported by the services with which they interact. While Dash is highly secure (e.g., based on Bitcoin, operating since 2014, etc.), some features of the Core protocol have not had a formal third party audit by a reputable firm.  

Many service providers do not support Dash’s unique features, particularly those pertaining to transaction speed / finality; a formal security audit would address one of the main concerns we hear from exchanges and would enable us to reopen conversations with these exchanges, brokers, and payment processors to support ChainLocks or InstantSend. Formal audits also lower the perceived risks of listing Dash and can help address the concerns of compliance and risk teams at exchanges, especially those that have stringent policies that would prevent unaudited blockchains from being added to their platform.

Dash Core Group has kicked off this initiative by distributing a Request For Proposal to 8 firms that specialize in security audits in the blockchain space. Three firms were shortlisted and we are refining the scope of the audit with each firm to deliver value and better align with our internal development timelines for v0.18 or Core. We expect to make a final selection by the end of August, at which point we plan on formally engaging them with a contract to start the audit activities in late September.

Three of the firms we reached out to were unable to submit a proposal due to capacity constraints and the average timeframe estimated by the three shortlisted firms was about three months. This timeline is important to consider since the same or a second firm may be used for the security audit that will also need to be performed on the Platform components and the associated supporting technologies we will deliver in v0.18 of Core. This proposal is only intended to fund the audit of the Core protocol (focused primarily on ChainLocks and InstantSend). A separate proposal to fund the security audit of the Platform protocol will need to be submitted when that development is nearly complete and stable enough to audit.

The three firms that were shortlisted are Informal Systems, Least Authority and PixelPlex. Two of the proposals were fixed quotes and one was based on a time and material estimate; the average of all three comes to approximately $200k. This portion of the DCG proposal is for ~$60k which would cover the first phase of the audit which is estimated to take one month.  Additional funds will be requested in the subsequent months of 2021 as we progress with the chosen firm(s) and re-evaluate our internal development timelines for alignment with the remaining phases of the Core and Platform audits.

If you have any questions, please direct them to @kot or @brianfoster in this Dashcentral post to ensure we are notified of your request.

Requested funding is as follows for the September and October budget cycles:
· 540.5 Dash for core team infrastructure ($99,000 USD @ $183 per Dash)
·     2.5 Dash proposal reimbursement
Total: 543 Dash

Note: Should any funding remain, we will apply it toward future infrastructure expenses and related taxes.