Last January, Authereum Labs was engaged to provide the following services:
Research and development of the Hop Protocol roadmap as directed by Hop DAO.
Day-to-day operation, development, and improvement of the Hop frontend currently hosted at hop.exchange.
Open ended research related to trustless cross-chain infrastructure and other technologies that may be relevant to Hop.
Our team has been executing these services without pause, however, with a smaller team than expected. As a result, costs have been much leaner than expected but our estimated timeline for the completion of Hop v2 has been extended to q1 next year. In light of this, we think a reduction of payments is in order.
Proposal
Reduce payments for Authereum Labs by 50% from $115,000/month to $57,500/month both retroactively and looking forward.
Execution
This payment reduction will bring down the total owed to Authereum Labs for February 1st to September 31st from $920k to $460k. If Hop DAO possesses stablecoins, $260k of the $460k should be paid to Authereum Labs and $200k should be deferred to another date. The Community Multisig should start regular payments at the end of October and should hold approximately 4 months of expenses as stated in the original proposal.
Authereum Labs continues to deliver improvements to Hop Protocol and have worked in good faith by covering their costs out of pocket. This proposal to reduce payment to Authereum demonstrates that they are aligned with the DAO long term and I fully support this proposal.
Great that costs have come down, thanks @cwhinfrey. Is the team smaller than expected because it’s difficult to find the right talent? Do you think the delay in v2 is directly related to the smaller team size? What other factors came into play with that?
Is the team smaller than expected because it’s difficult to find the right talent?
Not necessarily! There is always interest in bringing on new people, but the scope and focus of Authereum Labs right now is building out V2 and optimizing for that. Balancing the building out of V2 vs. hiring vs. other operations just comes down to time allocation.
Do you think the delay in v2 is directly related to the smaller team size? What other factors came into play with that?
IMO the ongoing evolution of the cross-chain world and broader L2 ecosystems is what has driven it. Superchains, growth in ZK tech, and other advancements are constantly evolving and are very relevant to the design of V2. Adapting V2 to be futureproof has been a big (and successful) driver of the timeline.
The below response reflects the views of L2BEAT’s governance team, composed of @kaereste and @Sinkas, and it’s based on the combined research, fact-checking and ideation of the two.
We’ll be voting in favor of the proposal since reducing costs is always welcome, and it’s our understanding that the reduction won’t affect the development of v2 in any material way, other than the extension of the timeline for its delivery.