Background

Large amounts of the treasury going unallocated every month is a missed opportunity to use those funds to Dash’s advantage. I detail various approaches to solving this problem in a post about reclaiming unallocated Dash treasury funds.

However, we reject the idea of approving lower-quality proposals or putting the unawarded funds in a general “rainy day fund” because the Dash should be earned and accounted for. We don’t want the wasteful government mentality of having to spend all the funds or having guaranteed fee money, because this would devalue Dash and result in the misallocation of resources.

The concept of variable amount proposals for a % of the unallocated treasury solves both of those problems.

What is a variable amount budget proposal?

A new type of budget proposal that works in the same way as other proposals except the amount is a stated % of however much Dash is unallocated for the treasury cycle.

So if the proposal is for 25% of the unallocated Dash and there are 100 Dashes unallocated it would get 25 Dash, if there are 1000 Dash unallocated it would get 250 Dash and so on.

Advantages

Allow us to make take more complete advantage of the monthly treasury to help Dash.

Avoids falling into the wasteful government mentality of having to spend all the funds because these proposals could easily be rejected if they are not advantageous to Dash.

No Dash would go to proposals that are not specifically approved so there is no guaranteed free money and there is still a real probability of the treasury not allocating all funds in a cycle.

Disadvantages

Time and effort to write, test and implement code and documentation (like any change to the system).

Added complexity for users to the proposal and treasury system (like any new feature).

Examples

Please don’t get hung up on if you like these examples or not. If these proposals would not be advantageous to Dash they would not be approved, just like standard proposals.

The point of this post is to discuss the concept of proposals for a % of the unallocated treasury. The examples are to show that some proposals would not suffer from receiving a variable amount each month that is not known ahead of time.

Example 1
Variable spend Google Adsense campaign
25% of unawarded treasury

Set up a Google Adsense campaign targeting the optimal keywords and type of users for Dash.

Let’s say the cost will be $0.10c per click. In a month where this proposal gets $1000 worth of Dash, we buy 10,000 clicks. In a month where this proposal gets $10,000 worth of Dash, we buy 100,000 clicks, or whatever it is.

The varying amount is not a problem for this proposal.

Example 2
Variable contribution to Dash core general savings account
25% of unawarded treasury

The Dash core team already have something like a savings account they manage allowing them to pay consistent USD-denominated wages in times of Dash price swings. This can go to any area of the Dash core project with accountability and transparency.

This proposal would better fund that account, and again, the variable amount is not a problem, just something they would manage and budget for.

What’s it called?

“Variable amount proposals” or “Proposal for unallocated treasury”

Okay, I might not have come up with a good name yet. Let us know if you can think of a better name.

Feedback, please!

Please let me know any ideas to improve the concept, any further advantages or disadvantages you can think of et cetera.

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Nakul Shah

Author

In 2016, I worked on my first client to help write a white paper for a crypto and blockchain project they were building, and started delving deeper into blockchain and distributed ledger technology.

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