Hi everyone. I’m a developer (of varying disciplines).
I don’t want to come across as abrasive but I do feel the need to mention the following; I thought Bonfire was already funded via multiple sources ?
Nevertheless…
• 500k Rally ? - I oppose this amount as I feel a lesser amount would be sufficient.
// I would also like to echo the points in mrq02’s post.
//Edited 6/29 4:37pm EST
Yeah, I can get that.
I think that as Rally is building itself as an ecosystem, and as funding for applications on top is crucial, at some point in the future we should think about how to formalize these kinds of things.
But I totally get your point on being too early and ‘over-structure’ at this point. I agree that the commitment to the Rally community is definitely enough right now.
What I would love to see is a startup building on top of Rally and then raising capital from external sources and VCs, building something stand-alone (like dapps are building on blockchains). Bonefire could be a good first candidate.
Thanks Kevin
An average yearly salary of a developer in the US is >$100K. Good developers cost much more.
We are talking about 2 skilled developers/entrepreneurs that have spent a considerable amount of their time working on this app. These kinds of apps can help Rally go through giant leaps of user adoption which is a high priority right now.
This case does not resemble the former propositions you mentioned for companies like CoinGate that are building a dedicated feature for Rally on a platform they already have + enjoying potential growth from the Rally ecosystem. In these cases the price Rally is paying is more of a mutual commitment than a real economic expense (that is how I view it).
Rally is in a growth phase, capital is relatively cheap right now, and attracting talented and passionate community members + users is a high priority right now. That costs money.
To echo what @Idan_Levin said, good developers cost money. Assuming you also have some level of project management and other overhead involved, $250K can get spent pretty quickly.
And I do agree that in order to grow and succeed, Rally needs third party integrations and products that make it more convenient for people to use and provide functionality that creators need.
That said, this proposal does give me some cause for concern. As was pointed out, it’s an order of magnitude above previous similar proposals. It also gets a bit murky proposing grants of this size because it is invariably going to be at the exclusion of other projects that may be just as useful. For example, in the creators that I am a part of, we’ve already used @mrq02’s storefront solution multiple times, as it filled a much needed hole in functionality. @davey’s Rallybook portal gets suggested several times per week in the Discord to provide data that people are requesting. Both of those products have arguably provided just as much value to the community already as Bonfire and haven’t gotten grants of any size.
I’m not saying Bonfire won’t be hugely beneficial, but now we’ve got at least three tiers (pro bono, <$100K, >$250K), and we probably haven’t scratched the surface of what will be built on top of Rally. Perhaps managing these questions in the future is part of what the DAO is supposed to address - that’s an interesting idea, although it kinda seems like DAOs are just the “new hotness” and I’m not convinced how well they work yet. Probably worth a try, though?
Yes, in my day job I am a CTO. I know exactly how much skilled developers cost; it varies widely based on location and the tech stack used. For the tech stack they use the average US pay is around $80,000 per year. As for whether or not they are especially skilled, I don’t know because although Kevin claims that they are very active in the Community Discord they have a total combined message count of 120. Compare that to my own 1,142, Dave’s 1,938, OverAchiever’s 840, Hatboyzero’s 80, or even d4arkcide’s (who joined the server not a month ago) 49, you’ll see that they are not active at all. Heck Yort isn’t even a Rally community developer and he’s got 41 messages helping debug stuff in the dev-general channel alone! I don’t know whether or not they are especially good developers because they are essentially strangers; almost my entire interaction with them has been me helping them fix their software. Which is totally fine; I’ve helped most of the community devs through at least one bug. But I wouldn’t consider them especially passionate community members. At least not visibly so.
All of that said, even if we agreed that $100k per year was the correct pay, I still would take issue because I don’t believe we should be granting a year’s worth of pay to anyone. A grant of 1 year’s worth of pay is fine if we’re gaining equity in the company (which is why I said it seemed like at this price the community is buying the software); otherwise it would be a loan and it sure wouldn’t be a year up front, but would be tied to completed milestones.
I was generous with my $40,000 estimate. The back of the paper math I used to determine what their current software was worth only returned about $14,000. Put in some margin for error and I would charge someone who asked me to make that app $18,000 and I’d have it done in about a month. And I charge $80 an hour for freelance work. The only reason I was willing to go so high is that I agree with you that attracting talent is a high priority right now and I would rather over pay than under.
Really the whole tone of Kevin’s original message felt very “hey my friends want a quarter of a million dollars, can we hook them up?” As a fellow community developer who’s actually passionate about the community it’s extremely hard not to feel insulted by this proposal.
Exactly!! Thanks for joining in the discussion.
One of the major value drivers for the whole network is attracting developers that can raise 3rd party capital. Bonfire is the first example. If we accelerate them through this grant, they will not be the last. If this proposal goes through, we will also be marketing this widely, because it’s such a great example, team, and live product.
If a handful or more companies raise money on the Rally ecosystem, this will dramatically elevate the value of the underlying platform. I plan on spending my time with Bonfire to help them be successful and raise a large round going forward.
Kevin
I do not have any existing relationship with Matt or Mel.
All I really want is to see venture fundable teams build new businesses on Rally. That’s it. This isn’t a proposal to help friends, as I have no existing relationship with the team.
I hope the new RallyDAO will enable anyone who is active in the community and reward them appropriately. I do not yet know what that would look like, but hope to work with everyone here to figure this out.
As a Creator, I was excited to try Bonfire, and am still excited to help make it better with feedback and better use the tools that are already part of it. It’s going to be an important channel to help with growth and supporter communication, which are both extremely important (and expensive) things to anyone looking to cut through noise. Understanding how to use it well is the key!
It’s also a tip-of-iceberg scenario. There are some low-hanging fruits in harvest with Bonfire now. They need many more features, reporting, fraud prevention, dashboard, bounty integrations, UI sexiness (even more!), etc. These fruits are increasingly more expensive to harvest. To a person at first glance, this seems like a large sum, and it is. But compared to the work ahead yet to do and balanced with the value it will provide at all further stages, the amount requested is a stop gap.
Mel and Matt have done quite a lot as a small team. They will need more developer resources. Teams get increasingly expensive as they get larger. Not in the obvious way only (engineer payroll), but in all other ways as well. Managing, planning, communication, process, etc. It’s harder to get bigger things accomplished, and that simply translates into expense and time. As their tools benefit us all by being a conduit to new users when used properly, we should be Rallying to support.
I will be transparent here. When I read this, my first reaction was “HEY! WAIT A SECOND!”. Yes, we have several active projects. Yes, we are extremely active, work with lots of Creators, have a large team, etc. However, my real reaction came out of… jealousy. Jealousy that we didn’t ask first and follow through more aggressively, and that it’s not PLAY’s Creator Coin Gaming Framework or CCG being proposed for a grant by Kevin here on the forums. However, we haven’t firmed up how we would like to be funded, company vs project (the available pieces of which have been unclear to all devs) and are still waiting to have a meeting with folks from Rally which has needed to be rescheduled for good reasons. And now it’s me on vacation and I’m the roadblock!
To summarize, we need this tool, need every little bit of value it’s going to cast off along its journey, and it’s exciting to see such a proposal. Mel and Matt have a working POC, rock solid use case, large target market, solid team, capacity to add resources, and need the fuel for the fire. Pretty black and white. Put the fuel on the fire.
Considering there background and the risk that they willing to take betting on rally in this stage. I’m fine with a upfront investment of 250.000$. If the community is happy with the result after one year we pay them another 250.000$ bonus. I’m against it to spend 500.000$ upfront its just to much for what they showed. They basically get free advertisement on top from us for there product if Rally will be a success.
@mrq02 I understand the concerns, I would view this funding as:
Pre-seed funding for something that can grow big on top of Rally (these are the amounts for launching such ventures. It is not a contracting agreement to build a predefined SW)
Please remember that we are still in a fantastic market for crypto. In 12 months from now, we might get into a bear market and it will be much harder to find good people to participate and take risks in building in crypto and in Rally specifically. Plus, in a bear market, 500k RLY might buy you 1/3 from what it buys now, or even less (that what I meant by capital is cheap right now).
Because capital is cheap and people are eager to participate, now is the time to ‘overshoot’, deploy capital and build. If you overspend $100k on a project that can lead to wider adoption, imo it is much better than the opposite case of underspending and missing the opportunity. In a year from now, we might miss this climate.
One more point to consider -
The way the tokenomics for Rally were built, with massive dilution in upcoming years, means that Rally is either becoming a huge ecosystem or RLY token price will stay flat because value creation is outpaced by token dilution. This means that Rally leadership has to take big bets, all the time (this is in part why I love this project). We have to go for the whole enchilada.
Idan
I dunno, man… Seems sus.
Welcome to the forum hatboyzero!
Feel free to elaborate. 
Nah, fam - I’m good…
My opinion is the grant/fund for Bonfire is a bad decision on multiple fronts that I will list in detail below. Both from the amount, the value add they bring, the grant versus investment view, and from the impact tonight community developers. For a proposal that large it should be listed separately with a supporting case/white paper on the value add that is being brought by that investment of funds. Otherwise it seems like a move to just give funds to developers we like based on a promise with no data.
The amount proposed for the Bonfire platform seems rather large based on the value that it brings at this stage. It seems barely at the alpha level of a project and there are no deliverables that I’ve seen in this proposal that would explain the level of funding. If anything this fund should be split into sections where the next amount is granted only if conditions are met. I would agree with other statements from above comments that would question this level of investment compared to both past proposals and also to the terms being deployed. It seems that many of the features promised are already available on rally via campaigns, the nft marketplace, or through currently free community developed applications. Even the email list seems trivial as I’ve been emailed by multiple Creators on Rally who got my email from Rally platform. If this is the case then maybe the funding would best be used to further develop the existing features versus paying for a third party to develop a platform that does not benefit the entire rally user base.
While the community and Rally should encourage developmental projects my belief is that those funds would be better utilized towards development on the main rally platform or advertising to increase awareness of the project and reach larger creators. At the end of the day any developmental projects business models should not rely on Rally to fund their development. If they are developed as a business such as Bonfire then they need to have a solid business model that supports their development and growth through signups fees, advertising, or similar. In Bonfires case they already are listed as having multiple groups backing them on their website. This would raise the question of what extra would this fund even bring and why give money instead of investing for a % of the company like the other groups? Again the lack of info on the “why” in the proposal is lacking. There may be very valid reasons but it’s lacking in the details and proof. Large proposals or grants are a great place for a white paper saying Creator X on Bonfire experienced % growth by using tools A & B. Without that basis its entirely open to interpretation and guesswork as the value cannot be defined.
Finally, we have many talented community developers that are investing their time and money into products for the rally platform. The last thing we want is to dissuade from the open conversation that can be had between these developers in the Discord, forums, or other channels. By choosing one developer for a large funding but not others it has the potential to create some hostility and reduce the free sharing of information and ideas. In the long run this will do more harm than good especially at this stage where community development is very needed for new ideas and growth.
As @KevinChou mentioned, both Matt and Melissa are extremely qualified. Matt was a PM at Uber and Melissa worked with the Coinbase Engineering team. They have thought about the intersection of creators and web3 very deeply.
Matt and Melissa are dedicated to Bonfire. Building out the product, onboarding new creators, solving creator issues, etc. They have been incredibly responsive when I have reached out to them with questions about the current features and product roadmap.
The efforts of the core team are better spent on building out Rally.io and ensuring that the token mechanisms and APIs are up and running. Bringing in a partner like Bonfire also aligns with the goal of decentralization. Also, note that the grant is in RLY and not USDC. I believe this aligns incentives between the Rally Community and Bonfire. For Bonfire to win, they are encouraged to provide the best possible experience for Rally Creators.
With mainstream creators about to get on the platform, there is a massive need for tools that can scale along with Rally and handle massive transaction volumes. Issuing this developer grant to Bonfire will help the team ramp up development and ensure that the product is ready for mainstream creators and their massive communities.
Hiring a freelance dev to build out tools is useful in certain situations. I don’t think this is the best way to go about it in this case. What happens when there are 1000 creators on the platform? 5000? 10,000? A Million? A dedicated team of engineers, designers, product managers, and creator support staff that own one project will be extremely valuable in ensuring that the tools that add utility to the social tokens can be reliably used by creators.
Absolutely agree with this statement. When speaking to creators that are considering launching a social token, a question about the tools available to integrate the token within their community is raised instantly. A major selling point re. Rally has been the tools that are available for the creator to integrate across platforms (Discord Coin Bot, Twitch integrations, Clubhouse gating, Twitter bounties, Bonfire etc) compared to other social token platforms.
I’m in favour of this proposal.
Is the Rally community offering to buy the Bonfire IP and employ them as staff? If so, then what you say here makes perfect sense. If we are offering to employ them as staff for a full year, then that amount as two salaries make sense given their history. But given that the purpose of the developer grants is to allow independent parties to quickly get their own personal business up and running, then it does not. The purpose is to get them up and running and on the path to profitability. Otherwise this is effectively Rally saying “I like you, so you get to succeed regardless; everyone else can fight it out on the free market.”
My biggest problem with this entire thing is that the CEO of Rally absolutely should not be proposing community funding for independent parties. And that it’s thrown in casually alongside a proposal that likely will (and should be) passed just further makes it seem like a kick-back. It reeks of cronyism; it is irrelevant that he asks us to trust him that he has no relationship with them, even if I believe him. The entire point of crypto and the ledger is that trust should be minimized (or ideally not required at all)!
Hi All I would like to raise a few concerns that I repeatedly see here as well as offer my thoughts.
First off, I would like to express my concern around the behavior that I repeatedly see whenever a proposal is brought up on the forum. Every funding proposal lately has faced an extreme amount of pushback. It is normal (and quite healthy) to have discourse but a lot of the discourse lately has centered around things like how much these deals are for and also that Rally would be better off building this out themselves. I think that it is important to note that unless my assumptions here are wrong, Rally does not currently have the staff required to build out all of these integrations and apps. Additionally, without these integrations, Rally will miss out on the growth from creators that do not have the proper integrations. Without the advantage of enabling the community through these grants, Rally will begin to lose their market edge. This i believe is the most important thing and is worth repeating.
Without passing grants and spending money to outsource work for integrations and apps, Rally will not meet its fullest potential.
The selfishness of people in the forum that are pushing back on these proposals in the hope that the funds will be spent on them in the future are shooting their value in the foot long term by inhibiting the growth of the Rally platform. We ALL win by enabling great people such as Matt and Melissa to work on Rally projects.
I think that Matt and Melissa’s project would be a great add to the rally economy. Yes it is a steep ask especially when you consider the potential future growth of rally but I think that the price is well worth it when we consider the caliber of these engineers as well as the growth that this project will provide rally.
It is possible that greed is a motive for being upset by large funding requests. But it wouldn’t be a very good one. Roughly 20% of RLY’s total supply is meant for community spending on initiatives. A much smarter play if one were greedy would be to support large payouts for enough development proposals to establish a precedent, and then submit a large proposal of one’s own. As long as not all the community treasury is spent before that person’s own large proposal got to a vote, it would be much easier to get a much higher payment than if that person had demanded each previous dollar be justified.
I mean that is one way of doing things. I also think that it is worth considering that having a few larger projects that are fully flushed out will be better long term than having many small projects with small funding that half-ass their use cases and are glorified MVPs.