NEM Foundation - Funding Proposal 2019

[LauraBKK]

I can only tell you how many there were in my country. Two. Myself and the Thai staff mandated by Thai law.
I’m sorry I cannot answer your other question.
Laura

[DaokaTrade]

I think most of the engineers of the Foundation who contributed to Catapult are NEM EU.
I think that the engineers of NEM EU will transfer to NEM Lab.

Then, I have some questions.

1. Are there any engineers other than NEM EU(NEM Lab)?
2. What kind of relationship will the NEM Foundation build with NEM Lab?

[simakki]

After reading through topic I probably will vote yes for both parties (NEM Foundation and NEM lab). Allthough I would like to hear more about how they will manage to sell XEM’s for needed USD. Will it be done on monthly basis or pay salaries with NEM etc.

[satkb]

…also would it be OTC trades when they convert XEM to fiat, so that it doesn’t affect the market price?

[okj]

1. If the price of XEM goes down, we will strategically reduce staff and projects. We aren’t hiring at full capacity in the beginning. We would be ramping up specifically for positions we need to focus on that are technical and projects that focus on bringing in revenue.

2. If the price of XEM goes up, we will slowly put fiat into the banks to help sustain us long term. If it rises for an extended time; we would also look at which projects were most successful and create more of those. A XEM surge does not mean salaries go up—they won’t. It means we look at the ROI of programs and pivot to add new resources to support positive results.

We will take care to avoid hurting the XEM price through rapid selling. Salaries will be a mix of fiat and XEM. We will liquidate as necessary, with priority for the first 3 months. After that we will make responsible decisions based on financial analysis.

^ just pasting this here from the Foundation Proposal deck so people can see this clearly since this seems to be a point of major contention.

[simakki]

Okay, thanks for clarifcation. It does sounds reasonable and sustainable enough at the moment.

PS. What about that legendary silver coin fund? Have anyone planned to do something with it?

[MattRiddle]

I think the NEM Community should take a lot of positives from the proposal above. I hope people take the time to listen to the full presentation from Alex and absorb everything that is being planned here. For me, the key aspects that make this a good proposal are:

• A strong commitment to good governance, well thought-out structures, and accountability.
• Building for the future. A product focus is right for NEM (and Blockchain more generally), and is well overdue. BUIDL! That’s how you’re going to get the market up, but more importantly it’s what we’re all here for.
• Significantly improved communication with the NEM Community, building trust and demonstrating accountability

Any concerns I have are really more to do with sanity-checking the feasibility of turning things around with what is being requested here.

• A 69% cut in staff is a high number. Going from a $22M budget to $8M is a big drop. With such a short time frame to freeze the team, and so many leaving, there is a danger that a lot of corporate knowledge is gone for good.
• This has been partly addressed above by Alex but the target salaries for some roles (particularly dev roles) seem under-budgeted, and I’m mindful that the best dev shops I’ve ever seen hire a smaller number of people who are extremely good at what they do (and don’t come cheap).
• The request is for 1 year’s funding, and XEM may yet drop further. What happens then? The projected revenue presumably doesn’t cover the full budget, so how do the activities get funded beyond 2019?

So in summary, YES I think the proposal needs to be supported, and I may be going against the grain here, but if anything I worry that it’s too ambitious to do everything proposed here with significantly reduced budget and a year to turn things around.

[Trikar_Blockchain]

Hi God Tanu,
I only know 2 people in Nem Japan. Ninja and Rio. If there are more people they should answer to you.
I met many Nem representatives in different countries but not everyone know each others or knew how many people are in a team.
BTW, I was alone in Hong Kong.

Anyway, I hope you support the New NF and honestly I know Japanese community is very active and not everybody is happy with NF but you should ask what do you want or expect from NF in Japan (apart from Catapult ) so Nem representatives can do better and support.
Thanks

[satkb]

Okay, thanks for clarifcation. It does sounds reasonable and sustainable enough at the moment.

PS. What about that legendary silver coin fund? Have anyone planned to do something with it?

I think it should be used to compensate the stakeholders who’ve HODLed through the ATH and lows and remained loyal, and have been shafted by the 2018 foundation. Just saying…

[spizzerb]

In the development for Catapult, there will need to be localised trainings (likely most will be digital) that can be understood in all levels (enterprise, government, individuals, startups etc), guides and manuals along with partnerships with other parties with the distribution and scale. This all supports to the development of Catapult.

A lot of the work will come also after Catapult is launched, like the commercialization, localisation to various languages, projects to manage etc. We are taking a revenue-driven approach through some sort of consulting, advisory (managed by the Chief Revneue Officer) for NEM Foundation to continue to provide support for version updates and further applications to be build on Catapult.

thx for trying to answer my question but i have to ask again:

"given that one of the goals of this propposal is to advance the development of catapult, how does it actually achieve this? from looking at the numbers I don’t see a clear focus on tech development itself

the propsoal calls for 8M of which 2.5M (31%) falls under the CTO. of that, there appear to be only 4 FTEs (together at 275k) working on nemtech development (excluding docs and websites). what happened to the positions listed on nem.io/jobs ?"

Out of 8M in funding you only plan to spend 275k on actual devs which support catapult/nemtech development. Can you pls comment how this fits the strategy “catapult first” ? Jobs from nem.io which are online at the moment are not considered in your proposal at all. Why?

Thank you

[Pedro_Gutierrez]

Hi, @spizzerb, thanks for asking again, our business plan includes 2.5M only for the development and support of CATAPULT, I leave you some of the features:

5 - 10 SDKs
Desktop app
API - REST
Mobile app
Block and Node Explorers
Lightning network
Hardware wallets for Catapult
others

The 2.5MM are divided into In-house developers, writers, designers, among others. As well as in a large budget for projects, so that other service providers can collaborate with the development and speed of delivery of CATAPULT

Our goal as a new Foundation 2.0, is to give the highest priority to have our product (Catapult) ready to market it, enhance its implementation and generate revenue, as we have planned in the new vertical structure.

[Pedro_Gutierrez]

Hello @MattRiddle, thank you very much for your comment.

I answer your question: we have made a great study of what is needed from the point of view of human resources and finance to decide to assign to the technology vertical a large budget, which we consider is more than enough to deliver on time and complete the objectives traced

We have teams in different parts of the world that are ready to start working, as well as service providers in Ukraine, Japan, USA, LatAm, Europe, Asia, ready to start proposing their companies to address technology projects.

For the fall of the XEM, we have plans in principle to make a small change to FIAT currency via the OTC. This would give us a space, so that the XEM is recovered. From the technical point of view, when we see the graph of the XEM in 1 day, we can see that it has apparently bottomed out. So after the Nem Foundation and NemLabs proposals are approved, I do not see another way to go up, so from my point of view, if we manage well, we can stretch our budget beyond 2020.

Now, in a hypothetical case, the XEM will definitely fall more (Sincerely I do not see what can fall more), Since the foundation we have a contingency plan to cut some verticals while technology ends delivering the product and can deliver the proposed results in CATAPULT.

Being able to fulfill the requirements of our community, to which we must give the results.

[Pedro_Gutierrez]

Thank you very much for your comments @lmkh

If you have any questions please let us know and we will gladly respond.

At the same time if you have any suggestions, please let us know.

[eddy]

Now, in a hypothetical case, the XEM will definitely fall more (Sincerely I do not see what can fall more), Since the foundation we have a contingency plan to cut some verticals while technology ends delivering the product and can deliver the proposed results in CATAPULT.

What is the foundation’s plan to stop dropping XEM’s prices? do we trust the graphics? sell otc I don’t think it’s the way out to cushion the fall.

[greentea]

Again thanks to the NF for the time/effort put into this new proposal. It really is a breath of fresh air and I like the new direction the Foundation is headed. For Transparency the team gets an A+
Just a few thoughts:

For some other critiques from community members about months funding set against milestones I really think that won’t work as top talent is not going to work on a monthly contract basis, that’s not the way to recruit nor retain the people you need to get the products out in an efficient and cost-effective manner.

I agree putting timetables is not ideal, but with public Catapult as the #1 issue, having 1 or 2 tangible milestones could ease community concerns. This would ensure focus. Ex. once roadmap released unlocks more XEM, and public Catapult released unlocks the remainder. I guess the biggest fear people have is funding 210MM and getting to Jan 2020 with nothing to show. Something to consider …

I’m also curious about the NEM Blockchain Centre. As the Flagship Hub for NEM, it appears to be generating some sort of revenue. Will it be closed down, what’s its future?

Will the Foundation make its own address(es) and tag it for all to see? I’m assuming it has one, but unable to locate it on the richlist

About revenue generation, cannot the NEM.io website use referral links on the exchanges? highlight Binance as they have a great program. Not much in the beginning but would snowball over time and takes 10 min. to setup. Might be some legal issue with this as a non-profit but I have no idea …

We have to separate XEM from NEM. XEM price was down because the Coincheck hack, probably the Petro, and because the whole market was bearish. Period. Without those things, XEM probably wouls stay in the top ten and better price.

Has the Foundation worked with exchanges to ensure this doesn’t happen again by setting up multi-sig wallets? I know the exchange has to make that decision, but the Coincheck hack really was a big blow for NEM, so hope this crisis wasn’t wasted.

I would be interested to know which of the verticals you will get up and running first and which you will be bringing online later, and is there an approximate timeline for that?

Good question

[Pedro_Gutierrez]

Hi @eddy thanks for your question

The only plan to stop the fall of the XEM is to finish Catapult.

Begin to show progress every 15 days, this will keep holders informed and the theory says that will keep the price stable or rising

[r3n3]

Can you @NEMSecretariatOffice or other NEM Foundation expert please share here in the forum thread how much is the NEM reserve funds available (in the various pots you are proposing to take funding from). Then, the community can more clearly see the relation of “2019 NEM Foundation funds requested” to the “available reserve”.

[Pedro_Gutierrez]

Hi @r3n3, thanks for your question. I am attaching a graphic that should answer your question.

Please let me know any other questions.

[r3n3]

Thanks for the quick reply.
So 210mio is 6.1% of the total reserve funds. Given that some of the reserves will be needed for Supernode funding and NEM Ventures, NEM Labs etc., I’d say we’re looking at roughly 10% of the reserves.
IMHO, that’s a fraction of the reserves well worth spending in 2019.

[DaokaTrade]

Would you tell me the technology part people and budget detail?
I have some questions.

1. What does Documentation devs / Technical Writers do? (ie: do maintenance of NEM Developer Center??)
2. What do designers to do?
3. I am not sure of the difference between the roles of documentation devs and website devs. Are you trying to make a different site from NEM developer center?
4. Is the project budget outsourced?