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. 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 😉
“. . . over 90% of the funding paid out in this month goes to . . . marketing.”
While we still have no:
– passphrase recovery in official wallet
– instant send in coinomi
– private send in coinomi
– convenient exchange between cash and dash
– convenient multi sig
– work towards Telegram payments API integration
I can’t be the only one nervous about the continued focus on marketing while important features are missing, and thinking that these things should not wait for a monolithic Evolution launch.
1: There’s passphrase recovery in the Dash wallet for both Android and iOS. Not sure why it matters for the official full-node wallet right now.
2-3: Neither Coinomi, nor Jaxx, has any special features on any coin. Who cares about them, we have InstantSend in both dedicated mobile wallets.
4: Have you heard of Wall of Coins? Bisq?
5: Coming in a month.
From where I’m standing, development is going just great.
1. Some people use computers, and consider phones to be an insecure storage place for cryptocurrency.
2-3. Some people want to use open source wallets that can handle different cryptocurrencies and facilitate exchange between them. Coinomi in particular aims to become totally cross platform, so adding full dash capabilities would be an efficient use of work. “Who cares about [open source, cross platform, multi-crypto wallets]?” Really? I do, and so do others. Not everybody deals in _only_ dash, and it’s nice to avoid installing a new wallet app for every currency one wants to deal with.
4. As I’ve written elsewhere on this site, I’ve had trust issues with WoC because of their business model and their continued failure to respond to my emails. Still, I gave them a shot today. It’s been over 3 hours since I started the process, and I still don’t have any sign of the dash, and I’m having a lot of seemingly ineffective chats with support. The communication isn’t clear, and they’ve just handed me off to another agent for the 3rd time. Additionally, I was hit with a whopper of an >$80 transaction fee with Western Union, the place near me that WoC reported as offering the best exchange rate (this is in addition to the poor exchange-rate/fee from WoC itself). This is certainly not “convenient” cash-dash exchange. Bisq has a cool model, but it’s not really cash-oriented, and though I’ve tried to use it, no one has ever been offering dash while I was looking to buy it.
5. I would love to hear what you know about that. I tried many times getting Core members to talk about it in Telegram, where one suggested I contact Andy on the team directly, which I did, but I’m still entirely ignored two months later.
Hi, can you tell me more about the telegram bot payments API integration (which you say is coming in a month)? This comment here is the first I’ve heard anyone but myself mention it.
Hi, do you have any source for your #5 claim? I still can’t find any evidence for that.
As far as Telegram – http://dashnews.org/telegram-bot-proposal-update/ is this close to what you are looking for?
No, I’m talking about the Telegram bot payments API. For clarity, here’s the message I sent to the Dash Core team a couple months ago. No response though.
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Best Approach for the new Telegram Bot Payment API?
Hi,
Telegram recently added a payments system for use by Telegram bots, and I think it would be huge if bot developers could leverage that to get paid in Dash, with the payer either using some form of fiat (debit card, most likely) or Dash directly.
Lots of good info: https://core.telegram.org/bots/payments
Any interest from the Dash team in pursuing this?
To your knowledge and in your opinion, is there an existing payment operator in a good position to take advantage of the bot payment API? A service that allows people to pay from a variety of currencies, and allows the receiver to receive the value in Dash? Payza?
Would this be better addressed by, say, the Ripple ecosystem somehow? Or an exchange like Changelly? Or one of those pseudo debit card services, like ShakePay? Or would this be best served when the mysterious “evolution” update hits — and if so, any chance of this being made part of the plan?
Thanks for any info!