TLDR: formally approve the operating budget for the financial year of 2023, $8m in total at current market rates.
Background
Despite having determined an operating budget for 2023 before the year started, it was never formally approved nor shared in detail publicly. Part of the reason for this was that there was no formal process for it in place yet. The treasury council has recently agreed on taking on this responsibility.
Proposal
Based on expenses of 2022, expected changes over the year and possible growth in the team, a monthly outflow of 192.5k of stablecoins was budgeted:
| Category | Type | AmountFiat | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|
| Contractors | Base | $100,000 | leaves $35k room for growth |
| Consulting | Legal | $30,000 | 50% reduction from 2022 |
| Consulting | Security | $30,000 | 50% reduction from 2022 |
| Hosting/Software | $17,500 | leaves $5k room for growth | |
| Marketing | $8,333 | events, sponsoring, hackathons, etc. | |
| Expenses | Reimbursements | $6,667 | $1k per quarter for 20 contributors |
In the last 5 months, treasury has built up a considerable stablecoin surplus of budget versus actuals for contributors ($+180k) and consulting ($+33k), and to a lesser extent for expenses ($+6k) and hosting ($+5k). Marketing was budgeted too low; it is currently at a deficit ($-11k) and marcom expects to go over budget by $95k in total this year. Smart contract auditors and other ad hoc costs for eBTC will cut into those surpluses for sure, but on an annual basis we appear to be on target.
For BADGER, the monthly outflows were budgeted as following:
| Category | Type | Amount | AmountFiat | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Contractors | Recurring Grants | $145,000 | leaves $15k room for growth | |
| Restitution | 58,333 | $131,879 | ||
| Contractors | Base | $100,000 | ||
| Incentives | 34,400 | $77,772 | ||
| Emissions | 8,600 | $19,443 |
Again, the current situation is a surplus for contractors ($+180k). Barely any of the emissions have been used yet, given they were halted at the beginning of 2023. Incentives are being used up fully every month on Hidden Hand. Restitution has already been agreed upon as per its BIP and is completely on target.
In total, this amounts to ~$2.3m in stablecoins and ~$5.7m worth of BADGER (at current market rate) for 2023. The necessary USDC and BADGER will be transferred from the treasury vault multisig to necessary addresses (payments multisig and treasury ops multisig) on a quarterly basis.
Lastly, a budget for 2024 will be decided on before the end of the calendar year.
Actuals to compare against: BadgerDAO: P&L 2023
