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Dash Incubator Rion 2024 Q3

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

Incubator Summary

Dash Incubator is submitting four proposals this quarter:

1.  This proposal requesting 350 DASH/month (down 450 DASH/month from my 2024 Q2 proposal)
2.  Ash's proposal requesting 200 DASH/month (same as Ash's withdrawn 2023 Q3 proposal)
3.  Mikhail's proposal requesting 400 DASH/month (up 200 DASH/month from Mikhail's 2024 Q2 proposal)
4.  Jojobyte's proposal requesting 400 DASH/month (same as Jojobyte's 2024 Q2 proposal)

Incubator proposals are split up to align incentives between strategists and MNOs.  All strategist proposal payout addresses, and hence Incubator funds are controlled by the lead strategist, tasked to ensure all transactions follow our basic Incubator rules.

Last quarter Jojobyte became an Incubator strategist with his own separate proposal (thank you, MNOs, for funding that).  As with all Incubator strategists, we will continue to collaborate and coordinate work together, but going forward Jojobyte's and AJ's work will primarily be covered under that proposal, allowing me to reduce my request.  Ash has a new proposal after roughly a year from his last one.  Budgets are tight for all strategists (see section 3 below for details).

Our Incubator WEEKLY video series continues to air every Monday.  The show highlights projects we're working on in the Incubator and important topics and tools in Dash in general.  Our 2024 Q2 Quarterly Report aired July 15th and is a good supplement to this proposal's text.  Jojobyte, Mikhail, Ash and I summarized our Q2 work as well as our plans for Q3, should our respective proposals get funded.



1 Reserve Summary

Figure 1 below shows the flow and stock of my own reserve over time.  The blue series shows funds received from treasury proposals.  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 Q3 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

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:

• PrivateSend JS SDK - Although Jojobyte and AJ now have their own separate proposal, this quarter was transitional where much of their funding came from my budget.  The PrivateSend/CoinJoin JS SDK was one such project that I continued to fund last quarter, but will be funded by Jojobyte's proposal going forward.  This is a library that will allow JS devs to easily integrated Dash's PS/CJ feature into JS settings (browsers and NodeJS).  I consider this project very important.  Most people want to use web-based wallets, and there are many independent multi-coin wallets that could integrate Dash's privacy features into their wallets if they have an easy way to do that.   That's what this project will enable.
• 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.
• 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.  Funding last quarter was for payment tools, no work done on merchant tools.
• Web Framework Integrations - This was one of the major focusses for Anthony and me this quarter.  The original playlist of Anthony's work is now extended to a new series where we are doing Dash Platform Walkthroughs with developers new to Dash, which is now 10+ devs.  This project started with 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.  Anthony's tutorial is based on the official platform tutorial on dash.org, but is expanded to provide a smoother experience for devs.  We have used this as a starting point when recruiting devs from various web framework tribes to try Dash Platform.
• 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.  Like the PS/CJ JS SDK, this will be funded primarily under Jojobyte's proposal going forward.
• 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.
  
• Merchant Loyalty Credit System - This project was covered on Incubator Weekly a while ago.  It allows merchants to issue credits (i.e. digital gift cards) to customers in exchange for money (traditional or crypto/Dash).  This project might be a good candidate for a real-world app that leverages Dash Platform, but it is no longer something I have funding plans for.  I hope the developer can continue working on it outside of my budget.
  
• Dash Developer Relations - This was for attending a developer conference here in Utah where I developed relationships with prominent web2 developers.  Dash Platform is designed to allow traditional developers the ability to make decentralized applications using familiar tooling, like JS SDKs.  I'm planning to start attending (and potentially sponsoring) relevant conferences so that Dash can gain mindshare and good will in developer communities. 
  
• Dash Incubator Org - This bounty covers various internal expenses for our organization.
  
• Incubator Social - This was a small delayed claim for participation in the Dash Retreat several months ago.  
  

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

• Continue working with devs to test Dash Platform (checking docs, developer experience, performance, etc).  This will be more effective with the upcoming stable testnet and mainnet. 
• Work with Jojobyte to keep testing their projects (web wallet with PrivateSend/CoinJoin, CrowdNode, Maya, DashSpend, treasury proposal creation, etc, and invite outside devs to test.
• Investigate Platform JS SDK issues (revealed in our Platform Walkthrough series) and solutions, e.g. add platform support to Incubator JS libraries/wallet, JS wrapper over Rust SDK, etc..
  
• Host Dash- and Maya-related meetups in my role as Blockchain Utah meetup organizer (for sure this quarter now that we have a launch date for platform)
• Additional projects, potentially real-world ventures like 88i, Merchant Credits, etc, if platform becomes stable this quarter (more likely now).

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 my funding request is 350 DASH/month, which is the lowest request I can sustain.  

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:

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