Hello Balancer Community! Elissa here from Orb. For those that don’t know what I do for the ecosystem, I manage Ecosystem and People Ops for Orb and for Balancer.
I want to shine a brighter light on our Q1 2023 Financials to show:
- What we are forecasting to spend and where.
- A more granular comparison between our updated forecast and what we originally requested for Orb’s Q1 2023 in our initial proposal for August 2022-July 2023.
I thought it’d be helpful to go line by line and give more detail to each spend category:
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Compensation: Represents payroll for contractors and payroll, payroll taxes and token distribution taxes for full-time employees.
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Security: Represents smart contract audits that we intend to do with either Certora or ChainSecurity. Each audit will cost ~$75k each and we anticipate that we’ll need one audit this quarter.
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Legal: Represents outside legal costs which will only be incurred if we need to deal with a legal situation that goes beyond our day to day business. We are collaborating with the Foundation’s board to develop an ecosystem legal fund so that Orb and other SPs don’t need to budget for this potential cost anymore.
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Insurance: Represents insurance to protect directors, officers and the business. Our D&O policy is through Orion Insurance and we work with the Marsh & McLennan Agency to source the best quotes in terms of price, business needs and overall fit.
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Accounting/Tax: Represents strategic CFO work, forecasting, financial reports, accounting, bookkeeping and tax advisory. We work with Propeller for finance and Blockchain Tax Partners for taxes. We originally did not budget for 2022 tax work (this was an oversight). We requested a conservative amount for Q1 2023 to ensure we have enough funds to cover the work.
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Recruiting: Represents recruiting costs for new hires via The Sourcery, a one stop shop for recruiting services. Since we have frozen our hiring plans we don’t have recruiting costs at the moment.
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Computers & Software: Represents computers for engineers if absolutely needed to be able to do their work, and software/subscriptions that aren’t shared at the ecosystem level.
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Onsites: Represents ecosystem Onsite spend. Twice a year Orb plans an in-person event for all core ecosystem contributors. A core ecosystem contributor is someone that spends 90%+ of their time on Balancer. The team gets together for four nights to collaborate and brainstorm in person and share meals and experiences, with the goal of solving hard problems and getting to know one another better. We work with Canvas Meetings to plan these events. The difference between our original funding request and updated amount reflects adjustments to our forecast to keep spend more in line with the time of payments, versus all landing in the month of the event.