Hey @cp0x
To keep things efficient and transparent, here is the context on the changes you flagged between the agreements. A full comparison table is a great idea but for now, here is the breakdown:
1 . The new budget breakdown. This “new” breakdown follows the repartition of line of budget per activity following the legal structuring of CoW DAO pursuant to CIP-64. However, you are correct in flagging it as it should have been expressed more clearly in the section “Scope of Service and Entity Mandates”.
The main difference stands in “Team Compensation”. You can see that in the previous Service Agreement No 4 (CIP-58) Team Compensation had its one dedicated line of budget while in this new Proposal the Team compensation is included in each line of activity (i.e. Frontend Team, Backend & Smartcontract Team, Solver Team, etc…). The budget form takes into consideration the expected budget for each activity including its team, infrastructure cost related to the activity (if any), travel expenses, etc.
Providing here a comparison, but we decided the current methodology makes more sense to us as we intend to share how much we spend per “functional area” to provide the services to the DAO.
| Serv. Ag #4 | Serv. Ag #5 | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Cost Centre | CIP Total | CIP Total | Var |
| Team compensation | 5,398,000 | 8,460,000 | 56.72% |
| Third party services | 517,000 | 1,670,000 | 223.02% |
| Events & Travel | 366,000 | 590,000 | 61.20% |
| Network fees & testing | 0 | 0 | - |
| Hosting | 570,000 | 850,000 | 49.12% |
| External tooling | 144,000 | 330,000 | 129.17% |
| Office (& Misc costs) | 42,000 | 500,000 | 1090.48% |
| Tax Provision | 563,000 | 0 | -100.00% |
| Total | 7,600,000 | 12,400,000 | 63.16% |
Note on the main gaps:
- Office (& Misc) - These include:
- Smart contract audits & bounties - 100k usd
- Business development incentives - 283k usd, for commercial payments to integrators, partners, co-payment of integration fees, targeted to ensure that we can pay integration fees that lead to significant volume growth to the DAO.
- Third party services - Increase in spend with external service providers (not core team), on initiatives like research support projects, paid ads, advertisement and placement of the brand, SEO optimisation, etc. Also includes several systems (that note software) that are directly impacted by the increase in networks.
Tax provision - Given incorporation of CoW Foundation, DevCo decreased its tax risk and hence no longer makes sense to request funds for tax provisions.
2 . Marketing & BD - The marketing & BDbudget for 2.9M includes:
- Marketing - all Core Team dedicated to that (5 team members and a prospective hire), a significant budget of 1M for paid media (which we’ll test like we did in Devconnect with wider awareness campaigns), an a reinforced budget for events (sponsorship, booths and travel)
- BD - 2 dedicated team members and 2 prospective hires. Also includes key travel and incentive budget for integrators and partners.
We find it key to double down on this area. CoW DAO product suite is top notch, and we need to ensure that it is known to all retail and used by the majority of bluechip protocols (e.g. this is the team that brought Sky, Aave and other integrations to the fray).We are moving from “maintenance” to “market capture”.
3 . Solver Funding - To clarify: this line item is not for paying the solvers themselves (who, as you noted, are incentivized by surplus/rewards via CIP-62). This budget funds the engineering and operations (including core team members) required to support the solver network. It covers the research and development of open-source drivers, improved APIs, and the technical onboarding of new independent solvers. We are building the infrastructure that allows them to compete and generate that surplus in the first place.
4 . Vesting distribution - As stated before, that requested amount is intended to align core team members and allow us to retain the help of world class contributors that are building and deploying CoW’s products. As the team size grows, overall token compensation increases as well but to reinforce, this is 5p.p lower than he initial allocation requested.