Stargate Foundation 12-month Budget Proposal

Issue Statement

Stargate Finance has grown exponentially in 2023 hitting major protocol milestones, including over $3.4B in monthly transaction volume and over $2M in monthly protocol fees generated.

While Stargate is a decentralized protocol supported by the DAO. The Stargate Foundation executes certain operations upon the will of the DAO. This support necessitates a budgeting and administration of expenses. With the protocol growing significantly in terms of community, use, partnerships and development, the Foundation should have a budget to support the DAO. The level of support needed has grown such that the Foundation requires dedicated resource allocation, as will be detailed below.

Proposal

This proposal is for a 12-month budget (September 2023 - August 2024) based on an estimation of costs required by the Foundation to continue supporting the DAO in the following functional areas:

Dedicated Support

• Foundation requires a small team of people dedicated to operating within the Foundation and executing upon the will of the DAO. This includes functions such as, but not limited to, the following;
  • BD and Partnerships - e.g. supporting protocols that build of top of Stargate, liaising with chains that get approved for Stargate deployments
  • Community and Marketing - e.g. coordinating launch announcements to Stargate’s >650,000 person audience, planning/coordinating community calls
  • Strategy and Analytics - e.g. analysing Stargate’s progress to self-sufficiency, efficiency of the rebalancing fee/reward design
  • Other areas that present in future

Technical Support (including audits)

• The Protocol requires continual technical support to execute upon proposals mandated by the DAO, for example:

  • Configuring new chain/pool deployments
  • Data driven emissions mandate

• Stargate is also security-first and new contracts should continue to be heavily audited

• Foundation will continue to liaise with technical execution partners as and when needed

Legal

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

Marketing

• Stargate should perform some marketing function, supported by the Foundation, for example:
  • Events at conferences
  • Educational campaigns with teams like Galxe, Layer3, etc

Other Operating Expenses

• Recurring expenses for day-to-day operations (e.g Moderators, web hosting, email services, payment processing, Discord bots, other toolkits)

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.

Execution

To obtain the funds, it is suggested to withdraw $900,000 in liquidity from the Polygon USDC pool. Furthermore, upon successful completion of this proposal, $900,000 worth of STG (priced on day of completion) should be sent to the Foundation multisig.

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. Below are the estimates.

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, especially given the growth of the protocol and the community, the Foundation is requesting a budget of $1.8M. These funds will be transferred to the designated Foundation multisig and used for various functions including, but not limited to; dedicated support, technical support (including audits), legal, marketing and other operational expenditure.