Curve Labs Builder Cycle #11 Proposal: July + August (70K + 35K)

This proposal is created for the Curve Labs contribution to Cycle #11 including the month of July and the first 2 weeks of August.

A full breakdown of the contributions and costs can be found here.

We have budgeted 6.9 FTEs for July and 3.45 FTEs for August.

There are 5 separate primary objectives that Curve Labs aims to address for this cycle:

  1. Providing product maintenance and technical support for Prime Deals V1
  2. Shipping Prime Deals V1.1 as well as leading product strategy.
  3. Play a supporting role in the Tokenomics and Governance design.
  4. Prime Stewards to lead their respected squads and support the re-structuring and talent allocation for the organization.
  5. Continuous support for the Proposal Inverter UX/UI.

In order to support these tasks, we will be providing support with:

  • PM: 1.25 FTE
  • Front-End Engineers: 3 FTE
  • Back-End Engineers: 0.75 FTE
  • Technical Writer: 0.5 FTE
  • UX/QA: 0.5 FTE
  • Product Strategy: 0.5 FTE
  • Operations: 0.3 FTE
  • HR: 0.1 FTE

Hey, @Blink-ku thank you for the proposal.

Before this moves on to the execution I would like to sound a couple of my concerns with this proposal;

1. Curve Labs do not play a builder role in Proposal Inverter.

There is only one Curve Labs employee that is working .25 FTE in the Proposal Inverter - Bartu.
I am sure the Proposal Inverter team would be happy to pay his contributions to the Curve Labs, but that will be extracted from P.I’s treasury - not Prime DAO.

*Ataberk is not being funded by the Proposal Inverter currently.

*Marvin Kruse has a contract with the Prime Foundation and the PI treasury has been/is compensating the Byte Rocket team from its own treasury.

This means that 2.5k given to Marvin Kruse should be lowered to satisfy the amount he will contribute to the Prime Deals only.

2. Blink currently holds the Product Management solely for Prime Deals.

There is nothing related to Prime Launch. If Prime Launch costs are integrated I heavily recommend taking them off them given the fact that Prime Launch is not held by the Curve Labs team anymore.

3. I see that Renc is to be compensated as a PM for Deals and in general for Prime DAO - not sure what is meant by that.

As mentioned above, Prime Deals Product Manager position is currently held by Blink. I do not see the need to hold 2 PMs for one Product. Especially if in total the PMs would cost 9.5k / month.

And in Prime DAO general, Stewards do not get compensated for Stewarding the DAO. They have vested D2Ds for them to do so. So I would recommend taking out the amount.

4. Eugenio is being compensated for Prime Launch and Prime Deals documentation.

Prime Launch team has its own technical and content writer team that operates effectively. I am not aware of any contributions by Eugenio on that side.
But, I would love to see the scope of work for Prime Deals’ technical writing. I remember the documentation being completed and activated. If there are more works that I am not aware of, I would love to see the details of the work. - I remember we were discussing a better front-end application to the documentation on the website but last I checked, the Curve Labs team didn’t have time to build it so we stopped pursuing it.

In general, I believe 105k for two months of operations that spends 2/3 on Non-Engineer Costs for a Product Building team is unnecessary and dangerous for the Prime DAOs treasury moving forward under the current market conditions.

I would love it if the team could reformulate their ask and lower the total ask to between 70k to 85k for two months of operations. Given the market conditions affecting everyone, Prime DAO holds the responsibility to support its builder teams under these conditions. But I would appreciate it if the requested support reflected the needs of Curve Labs without threatening the stability of the DAO.

Thank you.

Wanted to update the developments here;

After a great discussion with @papa_raw, the total amount asked for the July proposal will be reduced to 65k USDC. Curve Labs will ask an additional engineer to support the development of Prime Deals without an additional cost to Prime DAO.