Stargate Foundation Budget Proposal (November 2024 - October 2025)

General
1

Stargate Foundation Budget (Nov 2024 - October 2025)

Background

Stargate Finance over the past 15 months has grown to become by far the largest and most well-known bridge in the industry. The huge success of Stargate V1 in the first half of the year contributed many billions in volume, and millions in revenue to the protocol & DAO. In June 2024, Stargate V2 was successfully launched, which has since expanded to 10 additional chains, with many more in the pipeline.

While Stargate is a decentralized protocol supported by the DAO, The Stargate Foundation plays a significant role in the day-to-day operations of the protocol, as well as executing upon the will of the DAO. This support necessitates a budgeting and administration of expenses. In the previous 15 months, the Foundation team remained quite lean. Today, the Foundation team is growing much faster, across both technical and non-technical roles. The growth of the team, and level of support required by the growing protocol and number of partnerships requires a budget that is detailed below.

It should be noted that the previous budget was set out until August 2024, but the Foundation has so far continued to use excess capital to fund operations. In the event that this proposal is accepted by the DAO, and the budget exceeds an immediate 12-month need, the Foundation will continue to use the funds outlined below for operational expenses beyond October 2025.

Proposal

The proposal below is for a 12-month budget (November 2024 - October 2025), based on an estimation of costs required by the Foundation to continue support the DAO and the Stargate protocol in the following areas:

Dedicated Support

  • The Foundation requires a growing number of people to support the operations of the Foundation. The team has grown from 5 to 16 in recent weeks, with a target of ~20 by the end of the year. This includes, but is not limited to, the following:
    • Day-to-day management of the protocol operations (technical and non-technical),
    • Developing, operating and offering new products built on top of the Stargate core protocol
    • Other areas that may present in the future (the proposal is inclusive of the ability to grow beyond current needs)

Technical Support (including audits)

  • While the technical team within the Foundation has grown significantly in recent weeks/months, the Foundation will occasionally utilise external technical resource
  • Stargate also remains one of the most audited protocols in DeFi, with an impeccable security record, and the Foundation coordinates these, covering expenses

Legal

  • Corporate service, registered agent and general counseling fees across jurisdictions

Operations

  • Recurring miscellaneous expenses for day-to-day operations of the Foundation and Protocol (e.g. Moderators, Google Suite services, Payment Rails, Admin/Organizational software)
  • The Stargate Foundation is also responsible for covering the costs of protocol deployments, and the maintenance of the AIPM and StargateDVN, which consumed ~25% of the previous budget

Community/Marketing

  • The Foundation has coordinated a few small marketing campaigns this year in order to improve the recognition of Stargate’s brand, including sponsoring side events at conferences and announcing Stargate V2 at Consensus 2024
  • Community and Marketing will be a particular focus for the Foundation this year, as highlighted within the community

The operational funding will be transferred from the Protocol Multisigs to the designated Foundation Multisig wallet for ease of use and expenditure. An additional Operations wallet may be used for ease of payments.

Function Amount Allocation
Team $2,500,000 39%
Technical Support $750,000 12%
Legal $750,000 12%
Community/Marketing $400,000 6%
Protocol Operations $1,500,000 23%
Other Operating Expenses $500,000 8%
Total $6,400,000 100%

Note: the above table assumes a 90-day VWAP STG price of $0.32

Execution

To obtain the funds, it is suggested to send 20,000,000 STG Tokens ($6.4M, see above note) from the Ethereum DAO Multisig to the Stargate Foundation Multisig. The funds will be used exclusively for the purposes outlined above, and any funds that are in excess at the end of the period stipulated (October 2025) will continue to be used for the above purposes, unless otherwise mandated by the DAO.

Upon successful governance vote, funds are transferred hereafter to the Foundation multisig wallet. The Stargate Foundation will be tasked with dispensing the budget according to the above framework.

Summary

The Stargate Foundation does important work to support the Protocol and the mandate of the Stargate DAO. In order to continue providing support for the next 12-months, given the growth of the protocol, relationships and Foundation Team, the Foundation is requesting a budget of 20M STG Tokens. These funds will be transferred to the designated Foundation multisig and used for various functions including, but not limited to; team, technical support, legal, marketing and other operational expenditure.

2 Likes
2

[The Foundation is reserving the top comment spot for any future clarifications, updates, edit summaries.]

3

20 people on the team that’s a lot. Who and what are their roles? Full-time or part-time? Also let the community know salaries of each member for more transparency. Like what gearbox did.

Also: “Community and Marketing will be a particular focus for the Foundation this year, as highlighted within the community”

While only being 6% of the total budget, that seems low compared to the rest.

4

Hi, may I know why the team proposes allocating the entire budget in STG instead of splitting it with USD stablecoins?

Also, could you provide a rough breakdown of how much will need to be paid out in STG versus USD? I assume that all external expenses will need to be paid in USD.

5

For marketing, I think it’s fine to allocate more as long as the funds are used wisely and effectively. Additional funds can always be requested in future proposals if needed.

6

Thanks for your comment @Weff!

To provide a little more context on the Foundation’s structure, our primary role has been to provide operational support to the DAO and the Protocol, mostly around Stargate V1 and executing upon DAO mandate expanding to new chains. Over the past 6-9 months, the Foundation has played a much more active role in the development, growth and expansion of the protocol (more relevant for Stargate V2).

The Foundation has not historically had in-house technical responsibilities, and was reliant on external Technical Contributors (for example, LayerZero Labs, amongst others). To the extent that this is beneficial and necessary, the Foundation will still work with external Technical Contributors, however as of recently, the Foundation in onboarding significant internal technical resource.

With the introduction, and success, of Stargate V2 - and particularly Hydra, which is now bridging-as-a-service - there is a significant amount of technical lift both at the chain expansion stage (think contract configurations, deployments, frontend updates), but also at the growth and customer success stage. Stargate no longer expands to a chain and is passive - Stargate launches Hydra and becomes the lifeblood of the ecosystem, quite literally.

All to say that bringing on board significant technical resource will allow Stargate to not just launch on new chains, but spend significant time building out additional product sets that will promote the growth and expansion of Stargate.

The current composition of the Foundation is;
Foundation Lead: Lamps
Non-technical: Ecosystem/Operations (Gustas), Governance (Haz), Research (Nutzs), Community (Havds, new joiner!), Recruiting (1 PT), Legal (2 PT)
Technical: Product (2 FT), Integrations Engineering (3 FT), FE Engineering (2 FT), Design (2 FT)

Future Scope: Developer Relations (1-2 FT), Marketing (2 FT), Smart Contract Engineer (1-3 FT, depending on availability of external resource), Finance/Operations (1 FT). We are actively recruiting amongst most of these. The Foundations Job Board and prioritisation around hiring is publicly available: Stargate Foundation Jobs

On this portion - agree that it seems low. The truth is that in general community initiatives are just less expensive that literally anything else. This is meant to be an estimate, and by no means will cause us to hold back in supporting the community. That’s why @havds_stg is here!

2 Likes
7

The DAO Treasury was initially set aside for the support of the protocol, and the operations of the Foundation falls within that. Previously the Foundation has opted for taking a portion in USDC, but I feel as though it is in the DAO’s best interests to keep as much Protocol Owned Liquidity within the treasury.

If this is a contentious point, the Foundation would be happy to take some portion in USDC - however I do feel as though it is best placed in the DAOs hands!

A little difficult to predict which future invoices will accept STG (a surprising amount!), some external expenses would be STG. Of course a high percentage of the salary allocation (including 4 year vests) is in STG. Of the external commitments, somewhere between 25-40% given what we have previously dealt with.

Of course. We’ve typically taken a conservative approach to marketing spend, targetting high impact opportunities which cause a marketing buzz (e.g. the Stargate Bus, which people still tell me about).

2 Likes
8

Oh. The listed allocations are important obviously but I’m kinda worried about the token price I can’t lie. As it’s STG that will fund this.

I’m definitely not a pro but I think if this proposal is passed the token should also be a priority of the team when it comes to marketing and further development/utility. The product is amazing, STG is a part of that🙏

3 Likes
10

I’ll be approving, however please account for:

  • Property, plant and equipment
  • Consulting vs Contract labour vs employees e.g. in house legal vs external counsel
  • Accounting, reporting, financial auditing and taxation for transparency and accountability (its time to start producing annual reports and financial statements)
  • allow for education in the community fund
  • insurance
  • travel
4 Likes