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Dash Incubator 2023 Q1

3-month funding proposal to the Dash Network.

Summary

This proposal continues Dash Incubator's ongoing quarterly report and request.  We are requesting 1,000 DASH/month this quarter, as planned in our previous 2023 Q1 proposal.

1 Incubator Updates

in the past quarter we introduced Incubator WEEKLY, a video series that airs every Monday.  The show typically highlights projects we're working on in the Incubator, and as of this writing includes 9 shows.  The first Monday of each new quarter is a report of what we've allocated rewards to throughout the previous quarter.  Below is our 2023 Q1 Quarterly Report, which aired earlier this month. 



The quarterly report covers much of the information given in these proposals, so it's a good supplement or even substitute to this written text.

Other than introducing Incubator WEEKLY, the past quarter was mostly business as usual in the Incubator.  No changes to our rules, structure, or key roles.

Figure 1 below shows Incubator's high-level funding rates.  The blue series is our superblock requests, all of which have been funded so far.  The red series shows rewards paid to incubator contributors, averaged into monthly rates for each quarter.


Figure 1 - Reward and request rates over time

2 Project Updates and Outlook

The incubator distributed 2,999.6 DASH in rewards to 29 different projects over the past quarter (2023 Q1).  Figures 2a and 2b below show the breakdown of all rewarded projects.  The proposal submission fee is included in order to fully account for all Dash spent.


Figure 2a - Reward allocation by project


Figure 2b - Reward list by strategist and project

2.1 Rion Gull

The following videos cover projects that I reported on through Incubator Weekly:

• Developer tooling - Incubator Weekly
• CrowdNode tooling - Incubator Weekly
• New wallet project - Incubator Weekly
• New privacy project - Incubator Weekly
• AnyPay Assistance - Incubator Weekly

In the coming quarter I plan to do the following:

• Fund a professional audit of our Dash documentation (I've found someone qualified and interested).
  
• Fund a hackathon for a major web2 project (I have confirmed with the project, but it's not public yet).
• Finish the GitHub migration project.
• Clean up (and possibly retire) our Trello board.
• Propose an Incubator rule change to simplify the rules remove Trello dependency.
• Finish existing straggling projects such as the thumbnail image project.
  
• Continue work on payment and merchant tools.
• Take on interesting new projects.

More detail can be found in my internal Incubator proposal.

2.2 Ash Francis

The following videos cover projects that Ash reported on this past quarter through Incubator Weekly:

• Maya Integration - Incubator Weekly
  
• Summoners game - Incubator Weekly

Further project updates and plans can be found in Ash's internal Incubator proposal:

2.3 Tim Munsell

The following videos cover projects that Tim reported on this past quarter through Incubator Weekly:

• Dashmate Assistance - Incubator Weekly

A detailed list of project updates and plans are found in Tim's internal Incubator proposal:

3 Schedule and Budgeting

This proposal continues our typical 3-month funding proposal cadence.  

Figure 3a shows the Incubator’s historical and current proposal submissions.  We are requesting 1,000 DASH/month for 3 months, as planned in our previous Q1 proposal.


Figure 3a - Incubator budget requests

Figure 3b below breaks down this budget planning for the following quarter (3 months shown in the table).  I'm including this table and a detailed explanation of it to help everyone understand our budgeting and award system.  This table can always be accessed in our Accounting spreadsheet.


Figure 3b - Strategist reserve planning

Some notes from the figure:

• Columns A and B indicate the source and destination of external and internal budget requests.
• Column E shows the current reserves in each account, along with the current (as of this writing) total of 3,456 DASH in cell E3.
• Column F shows the Incubator request of 1,000 DASH/month along with each strategist's internal quarterly budget request.
• Column G shows proposal delegations (i.e. 550 DASH from the Incubator general to me, 450 DASH from me to other strategists).
• Column H shows each strategist's projected output (rewards paid to Incubator contributors).
• Column I shows delegation/oversight commissions (10%, and currently applicable only to the lead strategist, but potential for other strategists in the future).
• Column J shows strategist admin commissions (20%, applicable to all strategists and shared with admins if used for certain projects).
• Column K is the sum of I and J.
• Column L is the surplus or deficit of each account/fund, based on requests, delegations, and outputs.
• Column M is the sum of E and L, representing the projected end-of-month balance.
• Column N is the projected buffer for each account/fund (including overall total in rows 3, 13, and 23).

According to the above assumptions and calculations, by the end of the quarter we expect to have the following buffers:

• 2.7 month buffer overall (down from 3.2 months from last quarter)
• 2.2+ month buffers for each strategist (down from last quarter)

We'd like to raise each buffer to around 6 months over time, but we have no plans to increase our request to accommodate this.  If Dash does not appreciate in value we'll need to curtail our activities (rewards) or explore alternatives for Incubator funding.

Terms and Closing

All operations of the Incubator funded by this proposal are subject to our current Rules.  This proposal forms a part of our Network Contract with Dash.  Our rules are always subject to and defer to MNO voting. 

Thank you, masternode voters, for your support!  As always, I'm very excited about this quarter and what we will accomplish.

Respectfully,

Rion