Summary
This treasury decision is for Q2 2024, to fund Association operations with ~$1.6M USD equivalent (~32% year over year decrease relative to actuals for the same quarter), while maintaining front of market security and development (Presentation - Badget 2024 - Q2). The goal is to build momentum from the launch to create eBTC foundational growth. Q2 builds from the 2024-Q1 budget:
The Association will provide a quarterly ‘State of the Association’ report that provides context into technical progress, product development, and overall operational performance.
Overview of request to fund the Badger Association for Q2 2024:
This corresponds to the second three months of the Badget, is in line with the spending plans and 12 month’s trailing actuals.
50% of contractor spend has been redenominated in $BADGER at the current price. Should the price of $BADGER decline, we may need to request another round of funding from the Treasury Council to meet these obligations, as they are repriced once a month for the sake of the contractors. No single line of the Badget represents more than 10% of the overall ask.
Accounting for Q1 variances, the actual request in tokens is as follows:
Directional elements for full year forecasted spend
- Contractor spend flat vs actuals with a higher degree of specialized SP’s
- Maintain high standard for audit and development for eBTC protocol
- Progress marketing to drive launch of a new stablecoin, integrations in key growth markets in Asia and go-to-market investments with partners
- Reduction in BADGER dilution, reserved for long-term incentive & growth partners
Contractor Fees
Expenses are a mix of opex and capex. It is difficult to determine which is which, likely most of it is capex if one wanted to capitalize all of the effort that goes to development. This means that eBTC would eventually be capitalized as a $4-6m capital asset.
It is impossible to tell what the growth metrics could be over the next 2-3 years but one could imagine that reaching a balance sheet size of about $100-200m in issuance (2-4k eBTC) will have ramped up sufficient net interest income over that time period to pay back the development expenses.
Stretching this out by a factor of 1.5-2.0 to account for development work that continues after launch. eBTC is in the development stages still and will likely continue to be the case for the foreseeable future, until enough modules have been added that you could conceivably consider unplugging service providers or ossifying governance.
100% of the Contractor Fees category is related to product development, software engineering, smart contract development, security and risk management, and the operations to enable growth. BALCO is a part of this category too, but not called out specifically (BALCO is just an idea for how to organize some of these activities but not a ‘formal’ service).
The contractor efforts are focused on building safe, scale ready growth. For example, make it as easy as possible for platforms to integrate eBTC, while retaining the ability to exist as a sovereign ecosystem. Apps want to do minimal work and take as little risk as possible with an integration, so the Association can facilitate that growth experience. This also creates opportunities for commercialization; accrue fees from all integrations because the path of least resistance is to use eBTC’s flashLoan service which accrues value to the treasury rather than somewhere else.
Marketing Fees
This relates to service providers that are focused on growing overall demand, Korean expansion, and programs to build umbrella brand awareness (digital marketing, PR, events, Key Opinion Leaders (KOL)/Influencers for social content, contests)
Development Expenses
Slightly lower this quarter in anticipation of development timelines. These are contractors such as Guardrail, Hypernative, Spearbit and so forth (security, web2 and web3 monitoring, alerts, war room support) with some minor expenses for web2 services related to development (Alchemy for example)
Legal and travel are self-explanatory. Legal expenses are optimized in anticipation of any potential requests or clarifications but may not be used entirely.
Potential Efficiencies
The Association is committed to operating efficiently and realizing budget savings over time where possible, and where those savings won’t compromise the ability of the association to continue roadmap development.
Product and Commercial Milestone - Build eBTC for foundational growth
- Ramp up protocol seeding execution in collaboration with the BALCO (Block Analitica, Steakhouse, and the Treasury Council)
- Execute the marketing plan to grow protocol awareness and adoption, in collaboration with BADGER, eBTC, and Asia service providers
- Support the LIDO incentive program to attract users with the goal of program expansion
- Enable BADGER expansion with market maker and partnership development pipeline
- Build eBTC integration pipeline to enable growth
Technical development milestone - Accelerate foundational eBTC growth
Web3
- Support eBTC protocol with monitoring, alerting, and incident response partners
- Provide technical advisory and execution for BALCO recommendations
- Develop leverage features to production-ready state and launch (contingent on market conditions to support the feature)
- Evaluate & integrate backup oracle solution into eBTC
- Evaluate & integrate liquidation MEV recapture solution (such as OVAL)
Web2:
- Run and maintain all bots (liquidation, MEV, etc)
- Integrate dedicated incentive program into eBTC.finance dapp
- Develop and maintain new incentive programs as required
- Increase e2e testing environment speed & robustness
- Polish SDK for open sourcing & release
- Support development for eBTC tracking dashboard in collaboration with Block Analitica
Operational milestone - Execute transparency plan
The Association will continue to share Association insights provided through updates and reporting:
- Technical development progress against roadmap
- Product, operations and growth updates
- Financial performance (i.e. budget vs actuals commentary)
