Proposal: Reserve $1.55M From POL for Sept. 2024 - Sept. 2025 Development & Marketing Budget

Proposal
1

Background

In August 2023, the MUX community approved the POL to allocate a $1.9M annual budget for September 2023 - September 2024, which was used to fund MUX development and marketing activities.

Between Sept. 2023 and Aug. 2024, MUX witnessed $32.67B trading volume and distributed $19.37M protocol income to MUXLP stakers, veMUX holders and POL. On the development side, MUX contributors released dozens of major feature updates, including the Degen Trading Protocol, MUXLP Tranches, Aggregated Position, STIP Trading Fee Rebate Setup, GMX V2 Leverage Boosting & Liquidation Price Optimization and more. Meanwhile, the MUX V3 development is in progress. In terms of marketing, aside from continuous CT activities and marketing campaigns, MUX contributors also secured a 7.9M $ARB STIP grant from the Arbitrum DAO and used it for trading fee rebates to boost protocol adoption.

So far, $913,380 from the $1.3M development budget and $563,030 from the $600K marketing budget have been utilized. $386,620 development budget and $36,970 marketing budget remain at the moment.

As September 2024 approaches, MUX contributors would like to post the following proposal for the new annual budget.

Proposal

MUX contributors propose to reserve a $950K development budget and a $600K marketing budget from POL to fund development and marketing activities between September 2024 and September 2025. The budget is proposed based on the previous annual spending and the planned scope of work for the coming year.

Since funds from the previous annual budget still remain, new POL withdrawals will only occur once the remaining funds are fully utilized. In addition, unlike the last withdrawal budget, the latest annual budget withdrawal will occur incrementally instead of all at once. The “$950K” and “$600K” will be budget caps.

Scope of the $950K Development Budget:

  • Development Contributor Wages
  • Frontend Development
  • Backend Development
  • Contract Development
  • Quality Assurance
  • Operational Cost
  • Product, UI, UX Design
  • Project Management
  • Maintenance
  • Protocol Service, Infrastructure, Software and Hardware Spending
  • Audits for New Contracts
  • Bug Bounties
  • Product-Issue-Related User Compensation

Scope of the $600K Marketing Budget:

  • Monthly KOL & Partner Incentives
  • User Acquisition Campaigns
  • Marketing Contributor Wages
  • Main and Intern Twitter Account Operations
  • Marketing Content Creation Spending
  • Partnership Building & Event Budget

Marketing budget disclaimer: If crucial opportunities for marketing exposure and user acquisition appear along the way, MUX contributors may seek to apply for additional special marketing budgets if needed.

Next Steps

  • Community discussion surrounding this proposal
  • Community members vote to approve/disapprove of this proposal
2

I myself don’t understand what that 950k dev budget will be used for, I want to see a backlog & a timeline. No meaningful developments in a LONG time, just some dust here & there to say something was done. Something like 100k development budget will be more appropriate to what has been done recently in terms of development.

3

Hey ser, sorry about the delayed reply here.

Since June, the contributors have been fully dedicated to developing the V3 of the protocol, which will introduce a new liquidity setup and multiple new trading features to improve LP and trader experiences. Since the development is in semi-stealth mode, the contributors can’t share too many details until V3 approaches the testing phase, but the development is on track atm. A major version update involves a new contract, frontend and backend design, development and testing, thus causing the “vacuum phase” for shipping updates.

Meanwhile, the contributors are still working on features, like Trading Journal, to improve trading experiences. Features like this will be released in the coming weeks before the launch of V3.

In addition, the MUX protocol suite consists of 3 (and soon 4) sets of contracts that involve sophisticated calculations and an aggregator app to ensure optimized on-chain trading experiences. Continuous maintenance is needed to ensure the proper operation of the protocol and stay up to date with all the integrations (partnered protocols like GMX and gTrade often have changes that require updates on MUX’s end). Related works require multiple contributors to continuously work on new development, maintenance and emergency fixes. Aside from all development works, there are also things like protocol service, infrastructure, software and hardware spending, audits for new contracts, bug bounties and potential product-issue-related user compensation.

Since there are still development budgets from the previous 12 months, budget withdrawal from the POL will not happen unless the remaining budget is fully used. Also, the “$950K” will serve as a cap; the actual budget spending speed will be based on the actual development and other cost, and it doesn’t mean the full $950K will be withdrawn from the POL.

Hope these can help to address some of the concerns.

4

Thank you for the clarification!
I understand that not many details can be shared about v3 to not share hopefully groundbreaking innovation with the competition before release date, but at least an estimated timeline of the major releases should be part of any serious development and would certainly help address major concerns. Developing completely in stealth mode is not exactly a best practice for any startup, because you want to create some sort of hype around new releases and attract the attention of traders (and investors) prior to release date, so please take into consideration improving this aspect!
Failing to make a public timeline (at least major features and gross estimation) implies, at least for me, lack of accountability, a chaotic development, without consistent feature delivery and maybe even skipping steps in the dev lifecycle, wich would be terrible for a web2 app, not to mention for a web3 trading dex.

In the spirit of web3, I’m a leave this here:
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