Firo Core Team Finances and Expenses Report February 2022

While we are discussing tokenomics and funding, I wanted to share the current state of Firo core team’s finances so people have more information.

Team receives approximately 16,200 FIRO (~USD54,270) every 30 days (dependent on block times).
We also receive some small amounts from OpenCollective donations (thank you so much!).

Reserves (being used for inventory in market making on Huobi) : ~$200,000 (comprised of USDT, FIRO and BTC)

Overhead Expenses:

Research & Development: 33,400 USD + 200 FIRO
Community Management: 2400 USD + 110 FIRO
Market making: 5,000 USD - 7,000 USD
Management & Support: 7200 USD + 600 FIRO
Infrastructure Hosting + Sysadmin: 3500 USD
Marketing & Partnerships & Advisory: 2150 USD + 610 FIRO

Total: 53,650 USD + 1520 FIRO

General notes

The amounts above are the amounts invoiced to us. Some of these expenses, while denominated in USD, they are paid in FIRO and it’s in their discretion whether to hold or sell it.

Our break even point with current reduced expenditure without dipping into reserves is about USD3.80. The ideal sweet spot for prices to be for smooth running of FIRO is about USD 5. For expansion, we would be looking at USD 7 or so.

Market making generally costs more but cause of our long term relationship we have negotiated temporary reductions until the market recovers.

These expenses have already been trimmed down significantly. There are several retainers and contributors where we paused their engagement until price recovers. This include social media management retainers, graphic design, UI designers, mobile developers and third party contractors for development work.

Previously when we had some excess, core team have also used funds to partially fund FCS proposals like the audit we did with Hashcloak.

Contributions from our NFT sales from Firo Moon apes, Firopunks team contributions and our Railgun partnership where we help them with feedback/testing have helped cover things.

Development and Research

For blockchain developers and researchers of our calibre, we’re getting an absolute steal. The budget currently funds 2 senior developers, 2 junior developers and 2 researchers. This budget does not include contractors which may work with us for a retainer or project basis.

Typically you would be looking to pay 120-200k USD a year (or 10k-17k+ USD/month) for each of these mid-senior developers. We also do not offer employee benefits (like medical, insurance etc) that would arise from a typical employment.

They have stayed with us for loyalty, a good work environment and belief in the leadership and project. We’ve had some projects head hunt our developers but the core ones have stayed despite being offered significantly more. I would like to reward them and increase their pay if price goes up to reward them.

Market Making

The reserve number of 200k USD fluctuates up and down as since it’s being used for market making, part of the inventory is in crypto.

I’m personally providing my own FIRO and crypto reserve holdings for Binance, FiroDEX and Bitmart market making as a way to support the network. I do not host any masternodes personally because of this.

The market maker we use operates on Binance/Huobi on all the pairs we’re listed on. Market maker uses Firo’s reserves for inventory for Huobi and my own personal crypto for inventory for Binance. The market makers strategy is to keep a market neutral position. Market maker retainers typically cost a lot more but we have negotiated lower rates while our price is low due to our long term relationship.

Bitmart and FiroDEX market making, I do myself personally or with the assistance of our sys admin.

Marketing, Partnerships & Advisory

This includes paid coverage and some retainers for publications to push out our news, advisory for introductions and listing assistance and promotional events.

Management and Support

This includes my remuneration along with Anwar and Ajay. Anwar is my right hand guy who helps keep everything running smoothly be it from helping to monitor the overall Firo ecosystem and alerting me to things that need my attention or helping to test. Ajay supports Anwar in testing, social media postings and being the first line of contact for the many offers we get.

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Thanks for clear transparency.

After read this, I am very worried about firo future. Are we gonna sustain?

If we face a multiple year bear market again, what are we gonna do? Can we survive?

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Well I personally think we’re already in a bear market :slight_smile: Luckily we still have all the necessary peeps to deploy Spark and our code is in quite good shape. But it may mean slower development on Elysium v2. I personally hope that we are near the bottom.

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Also if the proposal passes, perhaps the community can take ownership of several tasks like the community management etc or market making.

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There should be experienced persons who can lead and make decisions. Relying on average Joes is not a good idea.

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For technical issues I agree but community management is not rocket science :slight_smile:

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I think the worst has passed, we should see above U$ 10 soon

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It is very impressive that you keep all this talent with the current budget. Hope the crypto marked recovers and don’t fall too much. Personally I don’t think we really saw the peak of this cycle yet.

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As price is below the USD3.80 mark the core team is operating at a slight deficit. We are therefore doing a donation drive!

If anyone wishes to donate to the core team to support our work here are our addresses:

ETH or USDT/BUSD/USDC: 0xea9acc8d5eb5471cc300d8c7ed4a0e656491bf56
BNB or USDT/BUSD/USDC: 0xea9acc8d5eb5471cc300d8c7ed4a0e656491bf56
Bitcoin: 1Drru91xhBUwjN2Y2PajqBea4T7coFuqRX
Bitcoin Cash: 1Drru91xhBUwjN2Y2PajqBea4T7coFuqRX
Firo: aPsmJmbA5PzWPwJNqUFVFZ8h3eupbmiFR9 (Keep track on FCS)

If you have donated 10 FIRO/50 USD or above, you can DM me with the TXID and we’ll put you in our whitelist for our upcoming NFT project Firo Foxes with a special exclusive trait.

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I think you should provide more detailed and proved transaction about that expenses like screenshots and bill images to provide more transparency not just total numbers.

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鲁本老大,真的很希望您能把您的工作重心移到维护市值和币值的上面来,这其实不是难题,只需要您能让资本来接受我们的Firo就行了,只要能达到这个目的,那怕就是牺牲相应的一些不很重要的东西也是值得的,您说呢?

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Do you have any ideas on how to do it because I specifically laid out realities on what it means to attract investment. It means to dilute you all.

Reality of exchange listings, attracting institutional investors and influencer marketing

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Look, if you study the privacy sector over the last 6 years - they have all had the same direction in price, they are all roughly down the same percentage. THE ISSUE IS NOT WITH FIRO. And we also cannot compare ourselves with Monero, the first of something is always going to take majority of the market share. Firo is going the right path, everything is done right. Our time to shine will come one day. You just need some faith. Zcash is the 2nd highest privacy coin, if you invested at there all time high your investment would be on par with Firo. Right now, Firo is well oversold, if you beleive in the project now is the time to really accumulate

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资本市场如果不能吸引到机构投资者,那么这个市场就是一潭无波浪的死水,用在Firo来说,当你的项目足够让更多的人认识和接触,在资本市场里成为有起有落的时候,才会招引来更多的机构投资者的关注和投资,像股票一样,能为他们带来财富,这些投资者能在里面不断的、年复一年的赚取利润,随着更多的持有者的加入,就能把这座Firo金山堆集起来作为他们的财富中的部分投资标的,而这前提就是要有机构投资者的参与,排在第一位的是支持机构投资者,其次多上交易所,至于影响者营销之说则应该是在市值上去了自然就有更多的人去宣传了。@鲁本

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what will be sacrificed? the market doesn’t look good

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I have terminated the following:

  • Market making (though Hummingbot campaign still runs cause we committed to that already)
  • Management (I no longer draw a salary so support is now just 3200 USD)
  • Marketing & Partnerships (terminated)

I have paused:

  • Research resources so that it’s now only 5k USD. There’s opportunity to restart it. This isn’t too bad since most of the hard research work is done.
  • Community Managers

Right now to operate on a skeleton crew we need about
30k USD / month.

This will cover

  • 3 developers to complete Spark
  • 1 researcher to help advise on Spark stuff
  • 2 general admin
  • Infrastructure hosting

The reserve has been hit quite badly as mentioned it was used for market making and therefore portions of it were in BTC and FIRO. I’ll have to assess the damage but probably looking at 100k+ in reserves.

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market is bad, brace yourselfs for the storm!

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You know i’m always here to help with what i can. Since i have day work i can help with community (like telegram/discord) and testing…

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We have received an extremely generous donation of USD130k total from Arcadia @rasikhmorani to the general core fund that ensure we will complete our goals in delivering Lelantus Spark.

We will continue to be very conservative with our expenditure and will be posting an updated report soon.

Once again thank you so much to Arcadia for supporting us so much.

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woww, thank you so much @rasikhmorani

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