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Dash Incubator Rion 2024 Q2

Proposal to fund the Dash Incubator reserve administered by Rion Gull, Dash Incubator Lead Strategist.

Incubator Summary

Dash Incubator is submitting two proposals this quarter:

1.  This proposal requesting 800 DASH/month (down 100 DASH/month from my 2024 Q1 proposal)
2.  Mikhail's proposal requesting 200 DASH/month (down 400 DASH/month from Mikhail's 2024 Q1 proposal)

• Ash is not requesting funds this quarter (Ash's withdrawn 2023 Q3 proposal was his most recent request)
• Tim is not requesting funds this quarter (Tim's withdrawn 2023 Q3 proposal was his most recent request)

Incubator proposals are split up to allow more granular voting.  Each strategist (or prospective strategist) submits their own proposals for funding.  All payout addresses, and hence Incubator funds are controlled by the lead strategist, tasked to ensure all transactions follow Incubator rules.

Our Incubator WEEKLY video series continues to air every Monday.  The show highlights projects we're working on in the Incubator, and as of this writing includes 59 shows.  Our 2024 Q1 Quarterly Report aired April 8th and is a good supplement to this proposal's text.  Mikhail, Ash and I summarized our Q1 work as well as our plans for the upcoming Q2, should our respective proposals get funded.



1 Reserve Summary

Now that Incubator submits separate proposals for each strategist, this section covers only my own reserve.

Figure 1 below shows my reserve's high-level flows and stocks (balances) over time.  The blue series shows funds received from treasury proposals, such as this proposal.  The red series shows rewards paid to contributors to my projects, averaged into monthly rates for each quarter.  The orange series shows my reserve balance at the end of each quarter.  2024 Q2 is projected for reference, to put this quarter's funding requests in context of prior, actual numbers.  


Figure 1 - Flow and Stock of Rion's Dash Incubator Reserve

Last quarter my funding request was enough to pull my team out of deficit and bring it back to a sustainable level.  This quarter I expect to operate back in deficit since I am requesting less than last quarter, but  plan to spend more.  I will keep my main team working and also recruit additional contributors to alpha test our Incubator web wallet and Dash Platform.  During 2024 Q1 I distributed an average of 796 DASH/month in rewards to 10 different projects. 

2 Project Updates and Outlook

Now that Incubator submits separate proposals for each strategist, this section covers only my own projects.


Figure 2 - Reward allocation

A brief update on each project I funded this quarter:

• Modern Vanilla Web Wallet - This was work done by jojobyte through the quarter with the most recent demo on April 15th on Incubator Weekly.  It's a web/mobile/desktop-compatible wallet UI which uses our payment tool libraries under the hood.  We plan for this wallet to integrate all of the features the Dash community wants, for example CrowdNode deposits and withdrawals, Maya savers and liquidity provision, CoinJoin mixing in web/mobile, gift card integrations, as well as a simplified contact list feature that we've been working on which can be updated to support DashPay usernames once platform is complete.
• Dash Platform Contributions - This is a project proposed and started by Mikhail (pshenmic) initially for work on Dashmate, but administered and funded by me.  This quarter most of the work on this project was from AJ, who has figured out and documented how to set up all platform components without Docker dependencies.  This was mostly done in the beginning of the quarter, and has since been put on hold while Platform continues to be re-architected.  Most of this work is streamed live and can be found in our Evo NOW! playlist.
• Incubator Updates - This is our ongoing weekly show that features updates from Incubator projects, as well as other important Dash-related topics.  This quarter we covered 88i (a potential Dash Platform application), updates to our web wallet, a discussion on merchant adoption, development updates for Local Money, Electrum, and Merchant Credits, Dash Core Contributions, and discussions on masternode domain/DNS services, Dash Platform for web developers, and considerations for dApps on Platform and IPFS.  These are all available in the Incubator Weekly YouTube playlist.
• Strategy - This is for overall strategic research and planning.  It covers everything not explicitly itemized otherwise, such as recruiting, task documentation, payment transactions, communications with devs and community, engagement and research of the wider crypto space and the macro-economic environment that makes a market for crypto in the first place.  I spent a lot of time this quarter researching current web development trends and topics in order to become more conversant with traditional developers when the time comes for recruiting to alpha test Platform.
  
• Payment and Merchant Tools - This is ongoing work to refine our various payment and merchant tools, hosted under the Dash Hive GitHub organization.  Most of this work is streamed live to our Incubator YouTube channel, categorized in the payment tools and merchant tools playlists.
• Merchant Loyalty Credit System - This is a new project that we covered on Incubator Weekly recently.  It would allow merchants to issue credits (i.e. digital gift cards) to customers in exchange for money (traditional or crypto/Dash).  This project would be a very good candidate for a real-world app that leverages Dash Platform.  
  
• Web Framework Integrations - This is work done primarily by Anthony, which can be seen in our playlist of his work.  Initially the focus was on building starter templates for the various frontend web frameworks, but more recently the focus has been on testing and refining a general tutorial on getting started with Dash Platform, which is based on the official platform tutorial on dash.org, but expanded to provide a smoother experience for devs.  We will use this as a starting point when recruiting devs from various web framework tribes to try Dash Platform.
  
• Dash Incubator Org - Various internal expenses for our organization.

In the coming quarter I plan to focus on the following:

• Continue Dash Platform testing (checking documentation, developer experience, performance, etc) and invite outside devs to alpha test.
• Continue work on our web Wallet SDK and UI, integrate CrowdNode, Maya, DashSpend, treasury proposals creation, etc, and invite outside devs to alpha test.
• Resume work on our JavaScript CoinJoin SDK to bring mixing to the browser/NodeJS (started late last quarter, and moving along well, likely MVP by end of April).
• Start a new project to add Dash Platform support in our Incubator tool set (planned last quarter, but de-prioritized until now).
• Host Dash- and Maya-related meetups in my role as Blockchain Utah meetup organizer (planned last quarter, but timing wasn't good for various reasons, maybe this quarter will work).
• Additional projects, potentially real-world ventures like 88i, Merchant Credits, etc, if platform becomes stable this quarter (not likely).

I discussed some of these items in our recent quarterly report.

3 Schedule and Budgeting

This proposal continues our typical 3-month funding proposal cadence, now with separate proposals for each Incubator strategist seeking funding.

This quarter our funding request is 800 DASH/month, which I expect will put us back into deficit if the purchasing power of Dash remains where it is.  

Figure 3 below breaks down this budget planning for the following quarter (3 months shown in the table).  

According to the assumptions and calculations, by the end of the quarter the following buffers are expected:

• 0.7 month buffer for my strategic reserve (down from 1.1 months at present)
• 1.0 month buffer for the Incubator overall (down from 1.7 months at present)

Figure 3 - Strategist reserve planning (last updated April 8th) 

This table can always be accessed in our Accounting spreadsheet.

Detailed explanation of each value:

• Column A indicates the strategist and month for the upcoming three months of budget requests.
• Column B shows the current reserves in each strategist reserve, along with the total as of the screenshot in cell B5.
• Column C shows each strategist's budget request, along with the total in rows 5, 11, and 17.
• Column D shows each strategist's projected output (rewards paid to Incubator contributors).
• Column E shows the maximum base commission that strategists can claim (10% of the MNO-approved budget).
• Column F shows the maximum output commission that strategists can claim (20% of strategist-approved tasks, shared with admins).
• Column G is the sum of E and F, representing the total commission strategists can earn (up to 25% of MNO-approved budget over time).
• Column H is column C less columns D and G, representing the surplus or deficit of each reserve.
• Column I is the sum of B and H, representing the projected end-of-month balance.
• Column J is the projected buffer for each reserve assuming subsequent funding continues.
• Column K is the projected buffer for each reserve assuming no continued funding.

I'd like to raise my buffer next quarter if Dash appreciates in purchasing power.

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