Authors: JanaBe
Reviewers: Campbell Law
Abstract
This draft proposal outlines RARI Foundation’s funding needs for 2024, along with laying out high-level objectives of what the team will be focusing on. The budget estimated for 12 months of operations is 1,650,000 USD and it enables continuity of operations and team & vendor growth as it reflects on the RARI ecosystem growth.
Motivation
The RARI Foundation works on behalf of the RARI DAO and helps it achieve its mission of building decentralized NFT infrastructure to power innovative NFT use cases. In doing so, the Foundation deploys resources that span contractor salaries, vendors, legal, and marketing costs, amongst others, that ensure a smooth continuation of operations and allow for the expansion of the Foundation’s efforts to help grow the RARI ecosystem. The assumption is that the Foundation will continue working with the most skilled and professional contractors in the market, and it is necessary for the Foundation’s success to be able to offer compensation in stable coins or fiat money instead of $RARI in order to be competitive.
Rationale
The Foundation and the delegate community reviewed 2024 goals and the below budget reflects the resources needed to accomplish these goals.
Full overview of the goals can be found in Community Calls recap (Dec 19,2023). A condensed version or goals per focus area is below:
- Governance
- Re-run Delegate launchpad program twice
- Increase average unique voter per proposal from 10 to 20
- Implement Security Council expansion
- Product
- Distribute allocated Protocol Grants in full
- Establish RARI Chain grants budget
- Launch RARI Chain mainnet
- All Protocol contracts owned by the community
- Design solutions for potential multichain Protocol fee collection by the DAO
- Finance
- Establish a Treasury diversification strategy (via a community vote) and commence execution
- Establish Treasury revenue inflow:
(a) Assist the DAO with technical resources in case of potential Protocol monetization
(b) Establish RARI Chain revenue model
- Marketing
- Increase awareness of the RARI ecosystem:
- Active presence at 4-5 industry events
- Grow community and audience by 100%
- Boost presence and assistance with the developer community
- Establish a presence at key hackathons
- Team
- Increase current PT Community & Ops lead to FT
- Boost Social Media & Content manager with a FT lead
- Cover for 3-4 month maternity leave for Head of Strategy
- Hire a FT Dev Rel and a Ecosystem Growth Manager
- Outsource design, engineering, accounting
Key Terms
Rarible Protocol - multichain indexer and order book with SDK
RARI Chain - royalties enforcing L3 built with Arbitrum Orbit
RARI Ecosystem - applications utilizing the Rarible Protocol and/or the RARI Chain
$RARI - ERC 20 token, used in the RARI DAO governance
Specification
The proposed 2024 budget of 1,650,000 USD reflects the above goals, team, and resource needs.
With the RARI ecosystem becoming more robust, there are increased budget needs. Compared to the last budgeting cycle (H2 2023), this one-year budget represents an increase of roughly a third. This increase is due mainly to the growing infrastructure in the RARI ecosystem (launch of RARI chain, increased remit of Rarible Protocol) and its demands on resources.
| Budget area | USD amount |
|---|---|
| Salaries | 800k |
| Legal costs | 192k |
| Vendors | 357k |
| Marketing | 84k |
| RARI chain | 187k |
| Others | 30k |
| Total | 1,650k |
Specifics:
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Salaries cover 5 FT and 1 PT contributors, and design freelance
-
Legal fees include Cayman Island counsel, US counsel and a paralegal
-
Vendor fees include administration costs (Director of the Foundation and the Supervisor of the Foundation, both roles are required for the set up of the Foundation under the Cayman law), professional delegate fees, Security Council compensations, accounting services, engineering vendors
-
Marketing costs cover sponsorships, production and marketing agency fees (to be incurred ad hoc as needs arise)
-
RARI chain costs include infrastructure vendor fees, and a budget for artist incentivization for the chain mainnet launch
-
Other costs include travel costs to crypto conferences, and miscellaneous expenses such as office supplies, subscriptions, and event tickets.
Notes:
- The Director of the Foundation is responsible for the budget. They may opt to delegate day-to-day budget management tasks to the Foundation team.
- Budget spending shall be monitored by the Foundation’s appointed accountant.
- Periodic budget spending reports shall be shared with the community quarterly, no later than 30 days after the end of the quarter. The community may request budget updates at any point. In such event, the Foundation shall present the budget status no later than in 15 working days.
- If there are unspent funds at the end of the budget cycle, the Foundation may propose to keep the amount in an operational reserve. Otherwise, it shall be returned to DAO’s treasury within 90 days of the budget cycle’s end.
- The Foundation team shall respect the budget allocations as specified in the subtotals. It is understood that variations may occur. However, transfers between the budget groups should not exceed 30%. Budget reallocations larger than 30% will require DAO approval.
- Should $RARI price deviate from the USDC conversation rate at the date of the proposal submission, the Foundation shall either submit an additional proposal to request funds to cover the exchange loss or report the excess funds at the end of the budgeting cycle.
- Contributors (Team) are to be paid once a month in USDC unless otherwise agreed in their contracts.
- Legal and Administrative costs are to be paid upon receiving invoices from the Foundation service providers as per engagement letters or agreements with such entities.
Steps to Implement
Upon the budget approval, the full corresponding $RARI amount will be transferred to the Foundation’s operational wallet (0x2a83d2891Ef3df6967E3C2e9b69cCc7aD029736B), the Foundation will convert it to USDC to reduce the exchange rate fluctuation risk and the exchanged amount will be stored on the operational wallet (0x2a83d2891Ef3df6967E3C2e9b69cCc7aD029736B).
The Foundation may opt to halt conversion to USDC, should the exchange rate start falling below the desired conversion rate, and resume when the desired rate is met or if a conversion must be made in order to meet Foundation’s payment obligations. Payments within the approved budget in accordance with signed contracts are to be made by the Foundation administration, who will be responsible for the budget.