Thank you Tane for your insightful comments and for recognising the work achieved in 2024. We appreciate your engagement and want to address your question about our strategy for 2025 and the proposed budget increase, particularly regarding team compensation.
We see 2025 as a year of significant expansion and consolidation for CoW Protocol and its ecosystem. We’ve built a solid foundation, proven our product-market fit, and now need to capitalise on that.
The primary driver of the increased budget, particularly in team compensation, is the need for increased capacity to achieve the objectives laid out below:
- Network Expansion Demands: Expanding to new networks requires dedicated engineering, community, business development and marketing resources. This includes:
- Dedicated engineers: Specialists are required to focus on integrating with different technical ecosystems, and optimising performance within each.
- Community support: Staff are required to engage with communities and facilitate growth in new regions.
- Accelerated Product Development: With an expanded roadmap and ambitious goals, we need to increase the pace of development. The team will be expanded with specialised talent:
- Product and UI/UX talent: These resources are needed to ensure our products remain user-friendly and to build out the new functionalities mentioned.
- Additional engineers: We need to add developers to develop new functionality (like the V2 contract), to provide support to projects building on top of our protocol and to ensure faster delivery of features.
- Protocol specialists: Hiring additional specialists focused on LVR protection (for CoW AMM) and MEV Blocker technology is a must to ensure our competitive edge and offer the best product to our users.
- Ongoing Growth: We must continuously support the growth of the CoW DAO community, as well as the growth of our current solutions and ensure support to new integrations.
- Community support: This effort includes maintaining community channels, growing outreach programs, and engaging users.
- Ecosystem growth and support: We must provide strong documentation to ensure other projects are able to leverage our technology and help it grow.
- Strategic Hiring: While some of these new resources are expected to be full time, some will be allocated to more short-term projects and tasks. This can also involve adding senior team members, with expertise in their respective fields. This is an investment not just in numbers but in expertise.
Overall, this new year we expect a maximum of 15 new hires, mostly in technical areas - which represent the majority of the increase in people costs. This also comes after the Core team adjusted the overall team in late 2023 to align to market demand. Lastly, overall crypto market costs (salaries, tools, promotion) have been steadily rising, with more than 10% YoY growth that we have been able to minimise through contract negotiation.
We understand that $5.1M is a significant amount, leading us to be pragmatic in any budget savings. Our budget is based on a detailed assessment of the required resources. We are continuously optimising our budget, as shown by our lower spend in the past mandate. As noted, we rolled over a substantial amount of funds which could further support the development of CoW Products.