Hey everyone, I wanted to drop a note to offer some insight into a few changes that happened last week within workstreams. The tl;dr is that we (CSDO members) decided to reduce our spend by roughly 40% compared to what we budgeted. The goal is to ensure we can continue to sustain the long term health of the organization. We are not cutting back on anything we are doing (Allo & Grants stack remain our most important initiative, our Grants program - funding public goods is our second most important and Passport is our third), and in fact we have doubled down on areas we are seeing momentum (Passport, PGN, GTC utility).
Here are the details we shared with the team:
As you likely know, we (@CSDO) have been evaluating a lot of different financial factors over the last three weeks and want to share some of our thinking which is impacting our decision making. First and foremost, we know that crypto operates in cycles, and we are now squarely in the darker parts of our “winter.” We believe we have at least another 12mos of this market climate before we see any appreciable changes. As a result, we are ensuring we have a sustainable runway (leveraging a mix of our GTC & USDC) for the next 24mos at a minimum. We want to ensure we can continue to leverage the USDC assets in the treasury for at least the next 24 months to reduce any downward pressure on GTC.
Currently, the DAO has a budgeted annual spend of ~$13.8M annually. We have observed an actual spend closer to $11MM annually (Workstreams, GCPs, Events, etc.). In order to reach a sustainable spend we are targeting $8.4MM in annual outflows (Workstreams, GCPs, etc.) as we believe this ensures the long term sustainability of the organization. To get us to this annual spend it means a couple of things:
- We will be reducing the total size of our core contributor count (ie, cutting workstream spend on headcount by roughly 20% DAO wide)
- We will be reducing and eliminating many contracting engagements we had planned (Builds on Allo, DevRel interactions, Hackathons, Bounties, etc.)
- We will be greatly reducing opex costs (travel costs, events we run like SP, etc.)
- We will be more discerning in which GCPs we support to ensure they have tangible ROI that support our organization
This is never easy as it means some of our core contributors and friends will no longer be with us in our workstreams starting in July. We are offering severance to those who are impacted and will be highly supportive of helping them find new roles in the space or beyond. Offering support and empathy for those leaving is important to our culture and I want to ensure you all extend that support as well.
We want to assure you all, our community members, stewards and token holders that these changes have been taken very seriously and carefully considered. Our intention is to make Gitcoin as operationally sustainable as possible while continuously bolstering our efforts to grow adoption for our suite of products – further ensuring their longevity. We will be holding a Q&A next week (once US folks are back from the holiday) to answer any questions you may have on the actions taken by CSDO.
We appreciate you all so much, and we want to thank you all for the unrelenting contributions you have been making to get so many of our solutions to market lately. Please reach out to me with any questions you might have, and I will share more details tomorrow on timing for the Q&A, etc.
