Thanks @eboado @MarcZeller and @stani for your comments and overall support to continue AGD. First, I have canceled the Snapshot vote mentioned above in order to properly address the comments raised and reach a consensus before moving the proposal forward.
There seems to be additional appetite to reduce the overall budget. I can understand this given the current market conditions.
Due to this sentiment, below is a proposed new budget that incorporates the feedback raised and reduces the original budget by $750k. While this will impact AGD’s ability to fund builders and sponsorships, we are confident we will still be able to deliver on our mission. If the community is in favor of this budget over the original proposal, we can move forward with the updated budget. Here are the key changes to the budget:
Reduction in overall grants spend. While it is not an easy decision to cut from this area as it is the heart of AGD, given the importance of events and sponsorships (as has been mentioned numerous times by different commenters above), it makes sense to reduce spend to arrive at a lower total budget. This will also give AGD the resources to focus on quality and to develop an understanding of the different dynamics that will go into GHO, Portal and other new categories of grants. With the reduced number of grants to distribute, we can also evaluate the need to bring on additional reviewers.
rAAVE
- Agree with @stani that Istanbul is an exciting market and could be a great location for a rAAVE in the first half of 2023. We have kept an allocation to host a rAAVE in the budget.
- Outside of this proposal our tentative plan is to host 1 more rAAVE in 2023 (not included in this budget). As @MarcZeller suggests, DevCon is a strong candidate given previous rAAVEs around ETHCC.
We removed Consensus as a large-scale activation. There is still the option to potentially do something smaller, but given @MarcZeller’s comments and as it is not developer focused, it makes most sense to remove this as a main activation. This will reduce the total large scale activations AGD participates in from 5 to 4 in the first half of 2023: ETHDenver, ETHGlobal Tokyo, ETHGlobal Istanbul and a virtual hackathon for GHO.
The digital marketing budget has been reduced by $200k. Depending on the status of GHO and how well the initial sponsorships perform, we can look to increase spend to this category during the next proposal.
Finally we have decreased the buffer for events. This will mainly reduce other additional events AGD could sponsor and have a smaller presence at.
| Proposed Budget (2 Quarters) | Amount | Change from Original Budget | Payment Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Expected Grants to Award | $1,500,000 | Reduced by $300K | |
| Grants Total Budgeted Cost | $1,500,000 | 50% aUSDC 50% AAVE | |
| Event Sponsorships, Hackathons & Bounties (including rAAVEs, SWAG and other event production costs) | $1,100,000 | Reduced by ~$250K | |
| Digital Marketing | $300,000 | Reduced by $200K | |
| Sponsorships Total Budgeted Cost | $1,400,000 | 100% aUSDC | |
| Compensation | $240,000 | No changes | 50% aUSDC 50% AAVE |
| Maintenance: Tooling, subscriptions, gas reimbursements | $20,000 | No changes | 100% aUSDC |
| Legal Buffer | $90,000 | No changes | 100% aUSDC |
| Operations Total Budgeted Cost | $350,000 | ||
| Total Proposed AGD Budget | $3,250,000 | Reduced by $750k |
Currencies of payment
Being clearer internally on what grant categories receive payment in what currency is a good idea to work towards. To put some more rationale and numbers to it, there is a payment column next to each budget item with an estimated % of what currency each item will be paid in. Specifically for the grants portion, AGD will work to create guidelines on what category of grants receive which payment currency going forward. With these figures, aUSDC accounts for >73% of the total budget. As such, we will update our proposal to be paid 25% in AAVE and 75% in USDC.