It is good to see the discussion moving to a specific topic instead going as replies in one that was not meant for that. This is an important issue that needs to be discussed in depth.
I want to add some points in this discussion that others touched on briefly here and in past conversations:
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Balancer don’t live in an island/bubble. With that in mind, how are our costs compared to others? With the same size? Within the same market? Not only salaries but other relevant costs as well. Why is that important?
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How is our current runaway projection? The last update I found specifically about this subject was State of the Balancer Tresury: Resources. Did we improve our financial situation? How is the outlook for the Y2 ~6 months after our last public report?
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A bunch of random dudes (and girls) in a web forum may not be the best choice to analyze/propose budgets and salaries. It can be in the best interest of the DAO to have a dedicated person/entity to study (or benchmark) costs. It may add a healthy and needed distance to view the situation with a technical lens. It seems this worked (to have someone with a technical background to handle the task) with the treasury management by karpatkey. This is something we should consider.
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What transparency level do we want, as a DAO, in this matter? Are we ok to move to a model where we make a reverse auction to several SPs and choose the lower cost and don’t care how they will handle the tasks? Do we want to see all invoices and wire transfers between the relevant parties? Today, the DAO delegates this granularity to the entity responsible for the payments and only receives a summarized report. I’m not arguing in favour of any model, but this has an impact on the topic too.
IMO, it is a positive scenario to have a better structure to address funding requests than the current setup. We need more information to make educated choices. I probably didn’t find all sources on this topic (costs x revenue), but it would be nice to have an update on this front.
The impression is that we still have bull market costs (salaries in special) with revenue that didn’t drastically improve in the last six months. While we made adjustments to address this situation, like the selling of 250k BAL, how sustainable are we?