Proposal “found-donate-210608“ (Closed)Back

Title:Dash Foundation Donation
Owner:babygiraffe
One-time payment: 124 DASH (3607 USD)
Completed payments: no payments occurred yet (1 month remaining)
Payment start/end: 2016-08-05 / 2016-09-20 (added on 2016-08-02)
Final voting deadline: in passed
Votes: 648 Yes / 192 No / 0 Abstain
External information: www.dashwhale.org/p/found-donate-210608

Proposal description

This is a cross-post from Dash Forum

Now that the voting on budget proposals have largely settled into a stable position, we feel now is the appropriate time to leverage any remaining budget funds and put them to good use. The budget is currently pretty full... only 124.17 Dash remains unallocated. And a good portion of those funds are going toward community-sponsored projects.

This proposal seeks to donate 119.17 Dash to the Dash Foundation. The Dash Foundation is a non-profit entity located in the United States. To date, its main function has been to act as a legal entity acting on behalf of the network when one is required (e.g., signing contracts, litigation, negotiations).

The foundation represented Dash in a trademark dispute that concluded favorably earlier in the year, but more work is needed to proactively protect our trademark in other geographies. In addition, we would eventually like to issue legal opinions and guidance from a reputable law firm in the cryptocurrency space on the implications of PrivateSend on KYC / money laundering laws. Addressing these legal questions on behalf of exchanges or money transmitters in these legal questions will address one of the barriers to our continued adoption and acceptance.

Currently, most of the funding for the foundation originates from membership dues. However, membership numbers are low (24 annual dues-paying members) and other sources of revenue are small, so there is not enough funding to accomplish all the Dash Foundation goals.

The requested funding will help - though not close - the funding gap. By setting aside a small amount of funding when the network can, the foundation should eventually be able to start addressing the above issues.

For more information on the Dash Foundation, you can visit the website at https://www.dashfoundation.io/

Requested funding is as follows for the August 5th budget cycle:
Total: 124.17 Dash

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Discussion: Should we fund this proposal?

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4 points,7 years ago
I think that the foundation do a great job and fully support it, but I see that this proposal is controversial, so rather than throw my weight on to either side I will abstain as I often do and let the rest of the DASH community solely decide.
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1 point,7 years ago
voted no out of principal, i dont think putting a proposal up 2 days before the voting deadline and obviously without any consideration about an appropiate discussion time is the way to go. i find it actually a bit sneaky as most masternode owners normally take a bit longer to vote upon budget proposals in general.
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0 points,7 years ago
Yes, we seek to put up proposals at least a week ahead. However, this month there were so many late submittals and late support for a number of community proposals, that it was difficult to put up a final set of submissions. We actually had one that had >10% support that risked trampling some other community-sponsored proposals that had subsequently shifted (or were submitted after our proposal). As a result, we requested downvote of that proposal (as the funding was not urgent) and decided to go this route instead.
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0 points,7 years ago
i also dont think we should use the leftover funds this way...
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0 points,7 years ago
Looks like the Dash Foundation already has 853 Dash in the kitty and this is for future not yet known expenses. This 853 Dash may last forever too if Dash keeps climbing. The budget was designed to pay for specific expenses not store for future use. Voting no.
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0 points,7 years ago
The actual balance is lower. As I noted in the post on Dash Forum that you pulled the 853 Dash number from, there were additional expenses approved in the last two quarterly meetings. I am not an officer of the Foundation, so I do not have access to the current balance. The 853 represented only the last reported balance. Fernando should be able to provide the current balance if you are interested.

We have not received formal quotes for the work needed in the OP, but informal discussions with leading / respected firms in the space indicate that the legal opinions would fall in the range of $10-20k. Trademarking of Dash would be required in major markets and each is different, but it would constitute an even more substantial cost to cover the US, China, and most of Europe.

So the ~$1k this proposal represents is a small fraction of what is needed to accomplish the stated goals. So while we don't yet have formal proposals (because that would be a waste of the law firm's time given the Foundation's financial position), the need nonetheless exists and cannot be funded with present balances nor through a single budget request (at least not without taking away from our ability to execute on the business side). The fact is that unless our price increases substantially, it will be difficult to fund these expenses all at once and we will instead need to save over time to cover them.
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