[Poll] Should Firo continue its Development Fund and Community Fund?

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This poll is part of a series of polls to determine the monetary policy/tokenomics of Firo with the upcoming halving.

Don’t forget to vote in the other two polls:
[Poll] Should Firo have a tail emission?
[Poll] Should Firo keep its halving schedule or should we revisit our emission curve?

With the upcoming halving, if no change happens, all the block rewards will go towards miners and masternodes 50/50. This would mean the cessation of the development and community fund and the project will then rely completely on contributors and donations. We did this intentionally to ensure there is a strong community mandate to extend/vary the Development fund instead of just grandfathering it in.

This poll does not decide the percentage of the block reward the development fund or community fund should have, but instead whether there should be one at all. The second round of polls would decide the exact percentage/amounts.

The pros of removing this is that the project truly becomes decentralized especially with the ongoing crackdowns on privacy coins.

However the cons is that it is likely that development would purely rely on volunteers and our existing core team be disbanded.

It is noted that other projects have either ossified and not required updates (such as Dogecoin) or have generous early adopters that have benefited from an accelerated emission for example Monero where much of the supply was emitted in the first two years which allows these people to donate back to the project.

From a purely selfish standpoint, this is the question that is most time sensitive as if the development fund is discontinued, I would need to give notice to the current team to start looking for other work rather than last minute pulling the plug.

Also given our small market cap, if development goes to a standstill, it is likely that some exchanges might delist us.

Another option is to instead have no development fund, but proceed purely through a ‘Grants Committee’ which I assume would be some expanded role of the Community Fund Committee which are elected from our community. This would technically allow continued funding for development while allowing greater decentralization.

The primary issues with this approach is ensuring motivated and skilled Committee members which likely need to be compensated for their time. The weakness of committees is generally ensuring a group of motivated people who understand the project well. Without it, committees often devolve into a lack of initiative and direction and in a best case scenario become reactive in nature. Our existing CFC members donate their time and effort but even so it’s often challenging to obtain votes.

Note: While optional, we strongly recommend writing the reason of how you voted to better understand the community sentiment.

Should Firo have a Development Fund and Community Fund?

Should Firo have a Developer Fund and Community Fund?
  • No community fund or developer fund (all goes to miners/masternodes)
  • Maintain Community Fund and Developer Fund
  • Only Developer Fund, no Community Fund
  • Only Community Fund, no Developer Fund
0 voters
3 Likes

So far, what I have seen is that Community Fund is not working optimally at the moment, especially since the funds it has are very limited and with the situation where firo prices are currently low, I suggest focusing on developer needs first for project development. And if the firo price goes up then we will hold another poll regarding this matter.

5 Likes

I’d hate to see development of Firo stop - there’s still a lot of work that should be done to make it the best privacy coin in the world.
I’m voting for both community and dev funds - but would be okay if it ends up being only one or the other as well - as long as the process ensures development continues. I don’t think there are enough community members at this time to support a donation only development fund. Also, I don’t think a ‘Grants Committee’ would work too well at this point in time either.

8 Likes

Active and good development is what makes Firo best privacy currency. I fully agree with reasoning of Zed above.

4 Likes

If there is no developer fund, who reviews PRs/code commits to ensure there is no malicious code?

4 Likes

Fair point legally community fund better

developers can just get from community fund

if community fund is not working as intended then community fund need to be dissolved

and i may change my vote from community fund to developer fund until we get curve tree + spark & spark asset + coin voting + post quantum

other than that Dev fund creates big legal issues

1 Like

If Firo’s userbase continues to shrink, then development is going to continually get squeezed to death. For me, there are more pressing issues than development at this point unfortunately.

I voted “Maintain Community Fund and Developer Fund” but only under the assumption Firo will appreciate one day. Right now, it doesn’t really make much sense to have a Community fund. However I have enjoyed working with Vosto, and some good work imo resulted from it. Not sure that would happen if we only had a dev fund.

3 Likes

I voted for “only developer fund”. My feeling is that some work is needed for Firo to become technically stable, reliable and with a good user experience. The project is small and it’s fundamental that development doesn’t halt or slow down.

While having an organised community is very important, it’s fundamental to continue the effort of improving the usability of the tools first.

I’d make an exception for a non-dev “support team”, to help out users that are having problems with Firo-related tools and ecosystem. This will ensure a steady and organic increase of user base and community.

In my experience the best communities are not organized from the top down, but they are horizontal and based on the enthusiasm of the people for the project, with guidance and support from the team. When this becomes too cumbersome, then dedicated figures are needed. I don’t think we are at that point yet.

3 Likes

The community fund hasnt been working as intented because its funds are mainly used to cover the deficits of the development fund.
Might aswel just have a community fund that commissions devs to maintain the code.
It all comes down to the firo price, if it keeps going down (or stays at current level after halving) the only way to maintain a 50K/month dev overhead is to come up with adjustments that will likely drive the price down even more.

2 Likes

The Firo project is one of the, if not The, most innovative in the crypto privacy space. It has been able to progress this far due to the amzing team of cryptographers which it has assembled over the years. Their insight, creativity and imagination have provided the users of the coin with a level of privacy which is second to none. Yes, the price action has been rubbish, but that is because FIRO is fighting over liquidity with meme coins that are based on ETH and SOL, were brought into being at the click of a button, and rely on hype alone. When it comes to the financial-surveillance-techno-crunch FIRO is a totally solid project that will provide an impermeable, impenetrable and opaque sheild against prying eyes; those speculators of true shit coins will simply get doxxed. The time has not yet arrived when people realise the value of this project. The value in the project is derived from its intellectual prowess, this is what makes it stand out over its peers, it should leverage this key asset and pay the dev team (and their manager) for the work they do and the value that they add to the project. This is why I believe that cutting out the dev fund at this stage would be short sited and parsimonious.

Build it and they will come!

10 Likes

I’m gonna be honest, I don’t even know what the community fund is being used for, although I’ve been away for a good while.

I say definitely keep the developer fund going at all costs, Firo is one of the few crypto projects that I still have respect for, one of the very few that bring new things to this industry.

Strongly agree with @Thorfried and his view on things as they currently are, I believe it’s only a matter of time before people realize that transparent blockchains are no different than the CBDCs they all seem to “hate” so much.
I mean, just look at how many news stories there are about people being kidnapped, shanked, extorted just because they accidentally leaked one of their addresses online, it’s stupid and also pretty sad to see because they think “it won’t happen to them”.
If privacy wasn’t important, there wouldn’t be a multi-billion dollar industry behind it. There wouldn’t be Google paying mobile phone manufacturers to use their shitty search engine by default. There wouldn’t be Meta being sued 16 times a year for breaching people’s privacy.
Again, only a matter of time before blockchain/crypto as tech goes completely mainstream and people start realizing the importance of privacy.

Keep building cool tech, y’all!

8 Likes

Development and maturity of the ecosystem is key.

7 Likes

I completely agree with this. We are not yet ready to rely solely on the community. Hopefully and probably, there will come a time in the future when this discussion will be more relevant, but that time isn’t now.

4 Likes

i think we all agree that we want futher development. I personally can`t wait untill Elysium 2.0 aka Spats gets released.

However, a Dev Fund is often seen as a Dev Tax and doesn`t stand for a decentraliced project. Thats why i voted for Community fund only. The Devs can ask for money to continue development, and as we have seen in the past, they most likly will get the necessary votes cause the community want futher development.

Particl is doing it that way, and it is working fine. As long as the dev team is honest and doing a great job, as they have done in the past, there is basicly no change in practice.

The original plan was to cut dev fund in 2020, we have extended it for 4 years now, i think it is time to become more decentralized.

4 Likes

Totally agreed with @Thorfried , FIRO is so undervalued cause of the explosion of that called “memecoins” which they offer nothing of use case and no innovation in crypto-space, when all these project disappear in thin air in one moment , then ppl will realize the concept that offers in 100% privacy that Firo does. So, patience is virtue!

4 Likes

Voted for only developer fund. I feel the most important is to keep the dev team motivated and guess this is getting more and more challenging with recent price. Maybe sacrificing community fund would allow for some incentive for devs like travel to a conference while giving a speech about FIRO etc. my main concern is losing dev talent which will be difficult to replace and more costly. The worst case scenario in my view for FIRO is maintenance only and no funds for R&D. As hinted this is something looked at by exchanges also. Dex is cool but we need Binance liquidity.

If price moves in right direction I am sure Reuben and team will continue to reward community members going the extra mile. Still remember the bug bounty I got when beta testing Spark.

I believe the time for privacy will come sooner then later, also triggered by AI, unfortunately it typically needs a strong compelling event for people to realize importance of security/ privacy before they are happy to invest.

6 Likes

I voted for “Maintain Community Fund and Developer Fund” because I believe both are essential for keeping the project alive.

3 Likes

I believe that both funds should be maintained because they are essential for the project. Although the community fund is being used mostly (or all) to support development, this will not always be the case, the price of the currency will be better and the community fund can be used to finance proposals that help firo create ecosystem each more solid.
Why eliminate it if it is also working to support the development fund? On the one hand, miners will request an increase in their rewards and masternode holders will do the same. We all want more rewards but we will be leaving aside the development of the ecosystem, which in any case is what will give greater utility to the currency.
It would be a serious mistake to leave the project without development and it goes without saying if the project is left without a community fund because how would the project grow?
Although there may be private and individual projects that join the ecosystem, firo needs to support this ecosystem to make it stronger every day without depending exclusively on external initiatives, which are always welcome and very necessary.

2 Likes

We are finalizing the final poll voting options here:

2 Likes

I see that most people voted to disband the community fund committee.

Many people mistakenly voted this way because they think that CFC members put coins from blocks in their pockets, as I managed to hear in my Russian-speaking group. Some guys really think so.

In fact, these are payments from blocks that accumulate on wallets to which CFC members do not have access (I say this as an active CFC member). These funds belong to the project and are spent by the project management with our positive vote, for the good of the Firo project.

For example, we constantly sponsor the support of the core team, as well as the latest design developments.

A CFC member is a voluntary and elective position that is not paid in any way.

Those who read me and realized that they voted incorrectly have a couple of days left to change their mind.

The post is not for propaganda, but for clarity.

3 Likes