We greatly appreciate the community’s feedback and have carefully considered each point to refine our proposal accordingly across the following areas:
Auditing Costs
We are committed to maintaining the highest standards of security for the protocol. For this reason, once we have completed the development of Aave Protocol V4, in line with our development of past versions of the Aave Protocol, we plan to conduct 4-5 audits and pursue formal verification. However, in response to community feedback, we’ve decided to separate these costs from our main proposal and these will be shared closer to the time of release as we prepare for the audit. This will allow the DAO to assess these expenses independently, ensuring greater transparency and easier budget assessment.
Team Capability
While we believe that the size of the team does not directly determine the quality of the output, in response to the community’s request for greater transparency, we can disclose that the team internally allocated to building V4 currently would consist of around 15 dedicated personnel (composed of primarily end-to-end engineering, security research, QA, product and project management resources) which we would consider expanding during the course of our engagement. We believe the caliber of work and expertise required to develop a protocol as foundational as Aave necessitates a very highly skilled and experienced team. This has been the case for previous Aave Protocol versions developed by Aave Labs including V1, V2 and V3, and as such we believe the funding requested reflects the technical complexity of the proposed V4.
Revised Budget
In light of the feedback by the community, with regards to the budget, we have adjusted our funding request to $12m GHO, which includes $3m GHO upfront and $9m GHO streamed throughout the year. Additionally, we have removed the 25,000 AAVE payment. These changes underscore our dedication to responding to community feedback and represent our minimum acceptable budget to sustain the planned work.
We hope this information, and the proposed changes address the community’s feedback and demonstrates our commitment to transparency and delivering for the Aave community.