The August 4, 2017 Dash Treasury “superblock” funded 19 different proposals. This  was 4,551 Dash or $859,647 @ $189/D on that day.  This is a very large amount of money for one month in the life of a crypto currency.  This is even more impressive in that the funding for the operations of the “Dash Core” team is not included as they have had a multi month funding surplus which covered this month.

While not covering the “operations” of the core team, projects submitted by core did compose 46% of the budget with the biggest by far the Dash Conference at 37% of the total.

Looking at the funded projects I grouped them as seen in the following graphic:

Aug 4th Dash Treasury funded proposals

Aug 4th Dash Treasury funded proposals. First column shows projects covered by Dash Force News.

This month it was easy to group the proposals into categories.  The largest group was conferences at 49.7% of the payout, PR/Advertising projects make up 41.2% with Development coming in at 9.1%. For this snapshot in time over 90% of the funding paid out in this month goes to the broad category of marketing.

Conferences

The Dash treasury is funding 5 different conferences this month.  The majority of the funding (75% of $427K) is going to the Dash Conference in London on September 24th.  This also includes a Premiere sponsorship of the World Blockchain Forum which is at the same location on the following day.  I hope to see you there.

On September 7th the Dash core team will participate in and sponsor the “Blockchain & Bitcoin Conference” in Stockholm, Sweden as the General sponsor of the conference.

On September 9th the Dash core team will also participate in and sponsor the “BTC & Blockchain International Summit” in Beijing, China at the Platinum sponsorship level.

There are 2 non Dash core team funded conference proposals:

The Dash @ Digital Finance Conference 2017 in Frankfurt, Germany on November 13th 2017 with Dash as the Main Sponsor.

A series of 12 monthly conferences will be held in Caracas, Venezuela starting in September. I am excited about this one as it promises to help at least some of the people in Venezuela to move away from their hyper-inflating gov’t currency.

Development Projects

The Dash Bug Bounty Program is a proposal for 990 Dash paid over 3 months to establish a fully-managed bug bounty program with BugCrowd for one year. Jim Bursch, of DashBudgetWatch, will coordinate the bug bounty program with the Core Team.

The other project Business Integration Into Retail Sector has been already covered here and here.

Public Relations / Advertising Projects

It is clear that the Dash Masternode owners like airplanes!  There are 3 plane related proposals being funded:

Dash Branding on Race and Acrobatic airplanes (861 total Dash) by Scott Farnsworth who has proven to be a great communicator with many Dash related articles and interviews published.

Airline In-flight Media Campaign (171 Dash) will be running a 90 second Dash video infomercial on American and Virgin America airlines reaching millions of people.

Project Jet Plane – YouTube Dash advertising campaign (250 total Dash) is a video commercial starring a Dash jet plane that will be run on YouTube.

The highest funded project in this category is Adverts on Radiolab (665 Dash) which will run advertisements on Radiolab a radio show / podcast with 1.8 million listeners on 585 radio stations with 6.5 million monthly podcast downloads.

Other notable projects include Dash Force, the Crypto Show, and funding for Spanish and Portuguese Dash news.

Summary

For a “snapshot in time” view it was somewhat surprising to see 90% of the budget going into the broad category of marketing.  While vital to any product or services success I would not have expected it to be that high.  Again this is not the same as “during the past month” total spending.  It is just new and rollover project funding paid out on Aug 4th.  Dash core developer costs were “pre-paid” for this cycle.

I would encourage people with good ideas and industry contacts to submit a proposal.  Especially if it helps to directly buy, sell or spend Dash.  If you are knowledgeable in the Point of Sale software ecosystem a project to add crypto / Dash would be awesome 😉