Proposal “DashCoreGroupLegalJune“ (Completed)Back

Title:Dash Core Group Legal June 2021
Owner:glennaustin
One-time payment: 419 DASH (12464 USD)
Completed payments: 1 totaling in 419 DASH (0 month remaining)
Payment start/end: 2021-05-14 / 2021-06-12 (added on 2021-05-13)
Votes: 831 Yes / 74 No / 0 Abstain

Proposal description

Dash Core Group May 28th Funding Proposals
DCG is submitting 3 funding proposals for the budget cycle that pays out May 28th:
1) DCG Compensation: 2,472 Dash per month (currently in month 1/3)
2) DCG Legal: 419 Dash (currently in month 1/1)
3) DCG Bug Bounty: 75 Dash (currently in month 1/1)

This proposal
This is cross-posted here

What does this specific proposal fund?
This proposal funds a specific Dash Core Group legal/insurance expense: Directors and Officers insurance.

What is Directors and Officers (D and O) Insurance and why is it important?
Wikipedia offers a great definition of D and O insurance.   “... D and O insurance is liability insurance payable to the directors and officers of a company, or to the organization(s) itself, as indemnification (reimbursement) for losses or advancement of defense costs in the event an insured suffers such a loss as a result of a legal action brought for alleged wrongful acts in their capacity as directors and officers. Such coverage can extend to defense costs arising out of criminal and regulatory investigations/trials as well; in fact, often civil and criminal actions are brought against directors/officers simultaneously. Intentional illegal acts, however, are typically not covered under D and O policies.”

It is important for any organization to have D and O coverage as it protects the personal assets of directors and officers, as well as their spouses, in the event they are personally sued by employees, vendors, competitors, consumers, regulators, or others. D and O insurance is the financial backing for standard indemnification provisions, which holds officers harmless for losses due to their role in the company. Directors and Officers can be and are sued for a variety of reasons related to their company roles such as alleged breach of duties or violation of local laws anywhere they conduct operations.

This coverage is essential for Dash Core Group, because cryptocurrency is an emerging technology with a great deal of uncertainty regarding expanding and emerging regulation (including expanding definitions of “securities” and “privacy coins”), liability for software quality, and many other industry-specific risks.

Note that this insurance does not offer protection in cases of intentional illegal acts.

Given the highly uncertain regulatory environment that DCG operates in as well as the litigious environment in the United States, it is important to offer this protection to contributors at DCG in order to make it an attractive workplace.  It would be difficult to attract or retain talent without this coverage in place, as the personal risk would be too great, especially in this industry.
DCG is currently working with an insurance broker to conduct a search for the D and O policy that best fits our goals, but the amount requested is approximately what the broker estimates it will cost. The selection process will likely present us with several policies we can choose from at the end of June 2021.

We estimate that a policy that provides $500,000 - $1,000,000 of coverage will cost $50,000 - $100,000. Any funds remaining after paying the cost of the policy will be applied toward future legal expenses.  These include the cost of interacting with regulators, having outside legal counsel review integration and business development, use outside legal representation to interact with government agencies, etc.

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

Requested funding is as follows for the May 28th budget cycle:
· 414 Dash for legal ($147,000 USD @ $350.00 per Dash)
·     5 Dash proposal reimbursement
Total: 419 Dash

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Discussion: Should we fund this proposal?

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1 point,2 years ago
> We estimate that a policy that provides $500,000 - $1,000,000 of coverage will cost $50,000 - $100,000

Why is the insurance policy so expensive?

From this site:

https://howmuch.net/costs/directors-and-officers-insurance

> Lower risk businesses could pay as little as $250 a year for $1 million in coverage, while companies with a higher risk might pay more than $10,000 a year. However, the average cost of Directors and Officers Insurance is around $600 for $1 million in coverage.

$100,000 is quite a few orders of magnitude greater than the average cost... is crypto/DCG really that risky?
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3 points,2 years ago
I would like to see a re-organization of DCG. In particular, I want to see Dash Platform as a separately funded DFO.

It seems to me, even with recent price increases, Dash Platform eats up so much resource and time, that little is left for other essential functions such as governance and marketing.

if Dash Platform gets the success we imagine, there will be plenty of work to do. A Dash Platform Group will, hopefully, be in a continuous dialogue with developers, new and old. Educational material / resources, community building, further development to deal with scaling and decentralization, sharding etc.

With two separately funded DFOs - Dash Core Group and Dash Platform Group - with their own budget, we would clearly see the limitations and what balance was necessary. Then we could say, there is no excuse to postpone work on governance or marketing etc. I understand there is a lot of cross-over between the various groups and that can continue if these were two separate DFOs.

Separate proposals for things like legal etc don't make much sense to me. It seems far more informative to say, "here are two different DFOs with two different and clearly defined objectives".

In my last proposal - Set Your Price Proposals - there was no feedback from DCG. This void lead MNOs to speculate that DCG was too busy with more important things to do i.e. fully focused on Dash Platform. it was also argued that other projects (Dash Central, Dash Nexus and DMT) would not have the resources to make the necessary modifications, albeit minor modifications.

Ryan seems to recognize these issues but does not give it the priority I believe it deserves. Imo, a 60% ask from DCG with so much focus on Dash Platform is throttling *essential* work on governance and marketing. I accept moving governance to Dash Platform would be a massive boost but this should not prevent us from making important, but relatively minor, changes now.
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0 points,2 years ago
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. Splitting out the Platform team specifically would likely not have the impact you are describing here. There are 6 individuals on the Platform development team as can be seen in the appendix of each of our quarterly calls. Splitting them out as a separate entity would entail some potentially negative aspects:
1) Administrative tasks (e.g., finances, HR, company structure / governance) would require duplication, meaning those developers would need to allocate a portion of their time to legal / HR / governance / reporting / financial tasks OR would need to hire those roles. This would likely mean less time dedicated to development given the small size of the team wouldn't justify hiring outside help for each of the administrative tasks. Frankly, these are likely not items the devs want to spend their time working on. Other cost efficiencies like infrastructure and tools would need to be separated into different contracts leading to a more expensive footprint overall.
2) The 2021 price increase has already allowed us to hire additional roles in the Core, BD, and Marketing functions. We have a number of roles already posted to expand those functions, and more job descriptions nearing completion (will post soon) which are the functions that would work on the aspects you are expressing we expend more resources on. Splitting out Platform would not accelerate this effort in any way. In fact, splitting everything would be an enormous project for DCG to separate assets, remove access to our systems, etc.
3) Separate organizations would erode the abilities of the two teams to collaborate (and any conflicting efforts to be resolved efficiently), and Core, Platform, and Mobile are all interdependent technologies. For example, making a technical design decision in Platform that makes Platform easier to develop, but to the detriment of Mobile or Core and the development effort they would need to support it would likely lead to suboptimal decision making, as each team would be incentivized to make the decision that is best approach for their own supported components of the overall system. This would result in greater tension between teams, and genuine disagreements over the "best" overall approach would risk being unresolved.

We receive many requests and ideas from community members like yourself, and while we appreciate them, we simply cannot act on everything (whether you were to separate out Platform devs or not). Even if we could, many of the ideas we hear are completely incompatible with one another regardless, so it is impossible to please everyone even with infinite resources. Separating out Platform would not change this and - for example - allow us to prioritize the "Set Your Price" proposal or other specific ideas you would like to see implemented. We do work on and make improvements to the system outside of Platform with every release. These are debated and prioritized within the Core, Platform, and Mobile teams. While we can't always address the item at the top of each community member's priority list, we do capture ideas, weigh the pros and cons of many of the best ideas we hear, and assign a subset of those features for integration. We do listen carefully for features that are widely-requested as well (as opposed to ideas we hear occasionally).

Hopefully, this helps frame why we wouldn't recommend separating out Platform devs into a separate entity, certainly not if the intended purpose is to accelerate development of non-Platform features. It simply wouldn't have that effect.
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1 point,2 years ago
It seems you are justifying centralization. Other DFO's seem to manage with less than 6 staff.

The current limitations are easily tested, for if there were sufficient resources, DCG could expand on governance right now instead of deferring it.

The problem, in my view, is that while DCG is being paid by a comfortable margin, it does not see any pressing need to work on governance. This cycle went two full weeks without a single proposal because governance has stagnated and become uncompetitive to the broader market.
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0 points,2 years ago
Thanks for taking the discussion to DashCentral. I'll have Ryan comment on your specific ideas.

Separately, I agree that separate proposals for things like legal doesn't make much sense. I have been brainstorming alternative ways to structuring proposals for funding.
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