2021 Retrospective
We are happy to belatedly release the ETC Cooperative's Retrospective for 2021.
"2021 was another difficult year for the ETC ecosystem, following on from the 51% attacks which rocked ETC during August 2020, though the market did not reflect those difficulties."
...
"Heading into 2022, ETC Coop is now the sole legal entity funding ETC protocol work and is the home of all the core developers. Funding from Grayscale is expected to cease in April 2022."
"Thankfully, the ETC Cooperative is sitting on large cash reserves. Significant ETC price rises since April 2021 (see below sub-section “ETC market action”) has resulted in several million dollars’ worth of contributions from Grayscale into the coffers over the last 8 months of the year. These contributions have been an order of magnitude higher than in previous years, leaving us with several years of funding runway, which was never previously the case However, this funding will not sustain the Coop in perpetuity, therefore other forms of funding will need to be obtained."
AGM
The Annual General Meeting for the ETC Cooperative was held on 4th March 2022 at which the 2022 Budget and Roadmap were approved. There were two changes to the board, with both Barry Silbert and Charles Hoskinson resigning. Craig Salm continues as Chairperson and Elaine Ou, Roy Zou and Cody Burns continue as Directors.
Budget
Our $1.6M USD budget for 2022 is significantly higher than our actual spending of $483K for 2021, with a significant part of that spending being staffing costs, as we have grown (and will continue to grow) the team.
We added a full-time Hyperledger Besu developer in September and two full-time Core-Geth developers in January. We are budgeting to add a further core developer, a project manager and a communications and marketing manager during 2022.
Ecosystem grants program
In previous years the ETC Cooperative was only able to issue a small number of low-value grants in each calendar year, given our limited funding. With significantly higher fees from Grayscale during 2021 we are now in a financial position to reboot the grants program.
We are budgeting for up to $250K worth of grant-making during 2022 if suitable projects are proposed.
With Core-Geth and Hyperledger Besu development in-house, it makes sense to focus on the higher layers of the ecosystem and to incentivize dapp developers to bring their projects to ETC and for infrastructure providers to bring missing building blocks (DEXes, stablecoins, oracle solutions, bridges) to ETC.
Fresh proposal for a minimal treasury
In September, ETC Cooperative withdrew our support for the ECIP-1098 Proto Treasury which had originally been proposed by IOHK. The need for sustainable funding for both the ETC Cooperative and more importantly for the ETC ecosystem remains. There appears to be some remaining appetite for a treasury system if it is open and fair and limited in scope.