[HIP-37] Authereum Labs Engagement Adjustment

Background Last January, Authereum Labs was engaged 8 to provide the following services:

• Research and development of the Hop Protocol roadmap as directed by Hop DAO.
• Day-to-day operation, development, and improvement of the Hop frontend currently hosted at hop.exchange.
• Open ended research related to trustless cross-chain infrastructure and other technologies that may be relevant to Hop.

Our team has been executing these services without pause, however, with a smaller team than expected. As a result, costs have been much leaner than expected but our estimated timeline for the completion of Hop v2 has been extended to q1 next year. In light of this, we think a reduction of payments is in order.

Proposal Reduce payments for Authereum Labs by 50% from $115,000/month to $57,500/month both retroactively and looking forward.

Execution This payment reduction will bring down the total owed to Authereum Labs for February 1st to September 31st from $920k to $460k. If Hop DAO possesses stablecoins, $260k of the $460k should be paid to Authereum Labs and $200k should be deferred to another date. The Community Multisig should start regular payments at the end of October and should hold approximately 4 months of expenses as stated in the original proposal 8.

Voting Options Reduce Authereum Labs payment to $57,500/month No action Abstain