P-005 ACCEPTED: Funding Maintenance of Tezos Domains for 2024

Governance Proposals
1

Voting period

14 days

Category

X Request for action

Abstract

This proposal provides funding for maintaining and operating the Tezos Domains project for the core team for 2024 without any new significant features. The core team behind Tezos Domains is respectfully requesting funding to cover the necessary expenses for 2024 per Article II of the Tezos Domains DAO constitution.

Rationale

The core team behind Tezos Domains developed Tezos Domains and has been managing the development, operations, and maintenance since the project’s inception. This funding will allow us to continue in 2024.

Details

This proposal primarily aims to cover the operational costs required to keep the services running, which include infrastructure management and updates. Time has also been reserved for unforeseen problems and fixes, which will otherwise be used for small features as desired by the community.

Core Team 2024 Operation Budget Summary

Calendar Year 2024
Expenses $139,442.93
    Compensation $96,000.00
    IT (Infra, Subscriptions) $22,526.49
    Contingency (15%) $20,916.44

Responsibilities of the core team in 2024

Development of New Features

A portion of the budget will be allocated for enhancements (like bulk transfers), provided that no unexpected repairs are required.

Operations

  • Maintaining and upgrading Tezos nodes
  • Handling instability of Tezos nodes
  • Ensuring the compatibility with the protocol upgrades
  • Keeping the components up to date (taquito, beacon, angular, …)

Projection for Funding in 2024

For the year 2024, we expect expenses from this proposal to be covered by ongoing revenue. We project this revenue to be around $191,000, based on 90 days of domain registration fees and the current XTZ/USD rate at the time of publishing. New significant feature development can be funded with separate proposals based on community interest.

Here is the updated state of the treasury.

About the Core Team

The Tezos Domains team has been working together for more than ten years on various large-scale projects. We have been successfully developing and maintaining Tezos Domains since 2020.

Various members of the team have worked on other infrastructure projects in the ecosystem, most recently the selective indexer framework Dappetizer.

Specification

Provide funding for operational expenses in 2024 to the Core Team wallets to be paid in two parts after six months, always one month prior to the start of the half-year.

In order to mitigate the risk associated with Tezos volatility, and because all expenses are in USD, we kindly request the transfer be made in USDT. If necessary, with the conversion of XTZ to USDT to be done before initiating the transfer.

Funding schedule:

  • Immediately:

    1. Keyholders will approve the funding of tz1iVojPo5Vu7QQQ3QquqmB18mJBgFE1YeoQ (account held by the Tezos Domains Foundation) in XTZ with the equivalent of $69,721 from the on-chain treasury. The amount will be calculated from the going rate at the time of payment.
    2. The TDF will fund 0xa0e7309662235aA0722A2C99cD8735975ebAd1E6 (a wallet held by the core team) with 69,721 USDT.

  • In June 2024:

    1. Keyholders will approve the funding of tz1iVojPo5Vu7QQQ3QquqmB18mJBgFE1YeoQ (account held by the Tezos Domains Foundation) in XTZ with the equivalent of $69,721 from the on-chain treasury. The amount will be calculated from the going rate at the time of payment.
    2. The TDF will fund 0xa0e7309662235aA0722A2C99cD8735975ebAd1E6 (a wallet held by the core team) with 69,721 USDT.

EDIT: The voting period was extended to 14 days. because of the upcoming holiday season.

This proposal has been created on Homebase after meeting all ACTIVE criteria.

Vote on P-005: Tezos Homebase
Vote Ends: Jan 2, 2024 4:09 PM UTC

Proposal Passing Requirement (Request for action): 50%+ Yes votes, 10%+ TEDv quorum

3 Likes
3

I think a further breakdown of costs should be sufficient, suggesting categories for 2024 funding isn’t clear enough in my opinion.

Also this abstract; “ For the year 2024, we expect expenses from this proposal to be covered by ongoing revenue. We project this revenue to be around $191,000, based on 90 days of domain registration fees and the current XTZ/USD rate at the time of publishing. New significant feature development can be funded with separate proposals based on community interest.”

  • surely $191,000 isn’t based on the last 90 days as it’s pretty much been at the all time low of interactions and income from registration fees as per tzkt’s infographics.

Also would like to add, when are you guys going to be proposing technical improvements to the dapp or features that have been recommended to add from months back? Rather than just all financial proposals?

This isn’t a dig at removing funds from treasury, I understand it costs money to run but realistically, we haven’t seen any technical improvements in recent times to warrant the amount being awarded. Obviously, this is just my opinion, you can agree or disagree, but it would be nice to have more info on financial proposals as it’s so bland.

2 Likes
4

I would also like to correct something; I mentioned about info on tzkt, the increased amount of activity was based around the airdrop & the volume, prior & after this happened the activity has majority dipped out, creating a false sense of income, this amount should not be a dedicating factor as the airdrop itself probably account for 97% of new registrations or additional years. You’re expecting to gain around $191k when in reality, it would be a lot less.

2 Likes
5

This budget is scaled down and mainly focused on keeping the service running. Within the available time, we want to work on new features. We don’t have a finite list as of now, but we plan to introduce a feature board where the community can vote on the most desired features. We will then work on the features that are feasible and mostly desired.

Regarding the projected income, when looking at the whole year 2023, the last quarter yielded similar income to the previous three. Putting it into numbers, the average monthly income for a quarter was between 14.1k and 15.6k (Q4 income is at 15.3k monthly). I wouldn’t say the projected income is unrealistic. We must also keep in mind that the biggest factor in the income will be the XTZ/USD price.

6

/-If you don’t have a finite list as of yet, how could you be asking the DAO for funds? Is the funds requested a base amount to keep the project/dapp running? If so, surely you’d have a list on cost outgoings etc rather than just 3 categories?

It would be beneficial to the DAO participants to know where the funds are being spent & what on.

/- the feature board where participants can vote on added feature is a great idea!

/- all I was trying to say about the projected income volume is although you guys can only really go off historical records of income, it’s unwise to do so when you had ‘airdrop’ looming for a couple years. Now that it’s over & most people are not the happiest you could understand a potential decrease in income volume. If you look at income from the 10/10/23-end of October & Start of November to the end of November, I can guarantee that you’d see an obvious shift in income.

3 Likes
7

This is just a maintenance proposal to keep the project running. There is a time reserved for unforeseen fixes, which, if unused, would be utilized in developing new features.

8

Hi,

I’d like further breakdown of expenses as well before voting, although it does seem within reasonable maintenance parameters.

9

Your third point here is a good one.
Can the team divulge revenue from Domain registration in 2022 for example?
Ultimately, the infrastructure needs funding and team need compensating - but it would be really helpful to have a rounded revenue stream analysis so that the DAO has confidence this is payable from domain registration revenue going forward.
This is part of the reason I’m advocating for higher minimum domain registration fees in the discord group.

Thanks
Nick

10

We plan to monitor the revenue stream in 2024 and prepare quarterly reports. If the revenue significantly diminishes, we will prepare multiple scenarios for the DAO to choose the most suitable one. One of the possible changes we are considering is implementing a stable coin price (i.e., a price denominated in USD). This would be a significant change that would require a lot of time and resources (outside of this maintenance proposal). However, it would ensure that market volatility would no longer play a role, and the budget forecast would be more predictable.

As an essential infrastructure piece, the domain price should always stay low to allow any user to use it. Before any change, we need to be certain that we will not limit access to Tezos users. We could create a poll to determine the acceptable price for everyone.

2 Likes
11

Yeah, but we probably won’t see it. As it currently stands (and has stood) for the last month, 0 activity on socials (not sure about discord, but could imagine it not being great), obviously this is just my opinion but really bare bones operational costs should be paid. Without knowing what is entailed with each of the 3 categories it’s hard to determine, just feels like gatekeeping operational costs, which seems silly considering it’s suppose to be a DAO.

From an outsider, not going into any detail apart from ‘compensation’, ‘IT’ and ‘contingency’ it just looks abit dodgy, I’m not saying it is in fact dodgy, but it just looks that way due to the lack of financial information.

It would be ideal to allocate a small amount for marketing as this is clearly an issue, the project won’t be able to last without any public interaction. It doesn’t need to be a massive amount.

To the team; Please don’t think I’m just digging at this, I’m just speaking my mind with valid points.

1 Like
12

The expenses are as follows:

Our infrastructure costs consist of:
* Nearly 20 servers (redundant instances of core services ensuring high availability for mainnet and ghostnet) ~ $18,5k
  * Tezos Node Archives (Indexers)
  * Tezos Nodes Rolling (RPC)
  * TD Api + Indexer
  * TD Governance Api + Indexer + DB
  * TD Content Server + IPFS Gateway
  * Monitoring (Grafana+promeheus+alerting)
  * Build tools
* SaaS DBs ~ $1,9k
* SaaS services on public cloud ~ $200
* Emailing ~ $150
* SaaS Networking (Loadbalancer, domains) ~ $500
* Team collaboration software subscriptions ~ $950
* Discourse forum subscription ~ $315
  • Contingency - this is a budget for unforseen problems related to maintaining the service running

We have a need for marketing and content manager, but this is outside of the capabilities of the Core Dev team. We are working on the solution.

3 Likes
13

Thanks for this. What about the cost of running the foundation? Surely that would cost $20k*+
Expenses would surely need to be included in something like this?

14

The management costs for foundation entity was $7,066.90 for 2024. This expense was paid directly from tezos domains treasury. Also the amount has changed from the year 2023 to 2024.

For year 2025 (paid in 2024) I will create a proposal once we know the exact amount, so it can be again directly paid from the treasury account.

1 Like
15

I suggest we classify proposals depending on the need, as to kind and importance.

Operational proposals
Community proposals
Suggestion proposals

Also define the limitations, the extent and weight it would affect the entire project.

16

Changing proposal to ACTIVE, assigning P-005 and locking original post from further changes.

Voting details have been added to the OP as per timestamp.

1 Like
17

Confirming result for P-005

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(note: times shown are EST)

2 Likes
18

比较认同你的看法，我们需要更加透明的治理机制，财务治理。对于费用的花费和用处有更好和科学的规划。