My name is Justin, and I am the president and board member of MAGIC Grants. MAGIC Grants is a 501(c)(3) public charity that provides undergraduate scholarships and support for public payment infrastructure.
I am excited to announce that MAGIC Grants is interested in starting a MAGIC Firo Fund to support various Firo research, development, and security audits!
Here are a series of slides that I will present during the community meeting on the 10/11 of October:
We are very excited in getting the MAGIC Firo Fund off the ground! After the community meeting, I will schedule another livestream specifically for discussion of this Fund.
In the meantime, please feel free to ask questions and provide feedback here!
I like this legal infrastructure and model for support. It certainly would help to have a group making grant/investment decisions beyond the Firo core team.
I do think some seed goal and initial project would help. Otherwise we could end up putting the cart before the horse. I have seen some projects fill up committees that don’t end up doing anything.
So I would start by identifying a small-ish project that could be funded here, say a Summer-of-code style project for a student and faculty advisor to do for a few thousand dollars in a summer or semester.
Perhaps there are some items that dovetail with community wants/needs. Perhaps Elysium updates, or features for the wallet, or the mobile wallet, or something.
The initial goal of the MAGIC Firo Fund could be to specifically raise enough to pay for the Lelantus Spark audits, assuming that timeline lines up. Does that sound like a reasonable initial goal?
It’s normally not the case that if you donate $100, you pay $100 less in taxes. It adjusts your AGI down by $100, saving you $100 * (tax rate, eg 30%) = $30. So it would cost you $70 in this case to donate $100.
Yes, raising funds for Lelantus spark audit is definitely a good initial goal. Just start small and expand from there. Since this audit is important for the integrity of the Lelantus protocol, I would suggest it any donations (90% of the funds) will be fed into this audit first. If there are other proposals coming after this, I would suggest distribute accordingly (like 10 to 20 percent) to them based on their importance.
Regarding places to source crowd funding, I suggest to start with zero knowledge proof community at community.zkproof.org. Small community, not very active. But it is quite targeted to them.
I think it’s a good idea and is in the step of a good direc tion of decentralizing the decision makers. There is the added extra benefit of it being tax deductible for those based in the US. Let’s try it.