Top-up of Proposal 751 due to DOT price change
This proposal is to top-up our approved request from OpenGov #584, as due to the fluctuation of the DOT price, we have received 30% less liquid funds. OpenGov Referendum #584 / Treasury Proposal #751 was submitted on 2024-03-18 19:38:12 (+UTC). We requested 167,214.5 DOTs. At the time of conversion, the price of DOT was 9.4802, which translates to a request for $1,585,229.01. The funds were disbursed to the PBA on May 12th 2024, when the price of DOT was $6.6204, effectively making our funding $1,107,026.87 This resulted in a $478,202.14 deficit due to the drop in price of DOT. We did not expect such a level of volatility and our expenses are set in fiat. While we did allocate a buffer for the expenses to be incurred, this large deficit does not allow us to fulfil our obligations to our vendors in Singapore, our international faculty, and our operational staff. We are making a top-up request of 478,202.14USDC. As is the case with all Polkadot Blockchain Academy funding, any unused funds will be deducted from future proposals.
Comments (9)
Why'd you wait almost 2 months for this?
@YungBeef Yungbeef, until now we’ve liquidated by tranches based on our payment schedule with vendors.
We made sure to account for any DOT appreciation by counting it towards the next proposal and lowering the total asked. Our thought was that by waiting we were easing sell pressure on DOT, but if the community feels differently we will liquidate everything to USDC now and will only create new referenda with USDC requested.
To illustrate the point around accounting for DOT appreciation, the last referendum doc shows a treasury section in the Wave 5 cost breakdown section;
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1K1hkkK7OYxZ1dhpLMC36lJuO5FBlhEe1dMtQYyNcHbQ/edit#heading=h.gjdgxs
It shows that we gained $20,132.29 in DOT<>USD FX so removed it from the overall cost. This current referendum is accounting for the reverse of that.
César from the Mexican Collective DV
PBA has been a great initiative for the Polkadot ecosystem since the beginning. It is very important, and attracting developers at this moment is key for technological development.
I just have two questions: What are you going to do if the price of DOT continues to go down? Will PBA_TIM request more funds in USDC? And the second question is, if the price of DOT goes up, are you going to return the difference in funds?
César
@cesar we will likely request in USDC in the future because most of our payments are made in fiat to brick and mortar vendors like hotels, airlines, etc. If the price of DOT goes up between referendum proposal and receipt of DOT, we remove the USD difference from the next proposal. This will no longer be an issue once we start requesting in USDC from the next referendum onwards.