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The Splinterlands company is working to reduce our expenses as much as possible to ensure that we have adequate funds available to continue operating and improving the product indefinitely. The less money the company spends, the more money ultimately goes into the ecosystem and the game assets, which ends up benefiting the players and the company in the long run.
We've been working to reduce our non-payroll expenses down as much as we reasonably can, and we continue to work on that, but we are also trying to find ways that we can reduce our payroll expenses - which make up the bulk of our overall costs - without significantly reducing our productivity.
To this end, we are proposing that the DAO hire @cryptomancer to continue building out the Secret of Praetoria land expansion effective as of October 1st, 2024. This will help the company out significantly and we strongly urge the SPS stakeholder community to approve this proposal.
Cryptomancer's rate for software development services is $90 / hour, and would be capped at a maximum of 160 billable hours, or $14,400, per calendar month. In some cases, due to time off or other circumstances, the monthly total will come to less than this. This proposal will last for one year, unless the DAO votes to cancel or modify it before then, at which point it will end and a new proposal will need to be passed to renew it beyond that.
@cryptomancer is extremely detailed and organized and will provide to the community detailed timesheets and updates on his progress on a monthly basis which will serve as the work invoice to the DAO. The monthly invoice will be paid by the DAO treasurers in either USDT, USDC, ETH, BNB, or some combination thereof, on the Ethereum or BNB Chain networks, to the EVM wallet address provided on the invoice.
If this proposal is approved, @cryptomancer will still be part of the Splinterlands team and will continue to work with the rest of the team as normal to develop the Secret of Praetoria expansion. The specific tasks or features that he works on related to the expansion, and their priorities, will still be determined by the Splinterlands company, unless a future governance proposal is passed that specifies otherwise.
We understand that the DAO does not have unlimited funds and that the community needs to be careful and smart about how its funds are used, so we would not even submit a proposal like this unless we felt that it was necessary and we expect it will ultimately benefit the community more than it will cost in the long run.
If, however, the proposal does not pass, we do not plan to let @cryptomancer go. We plan to keep him on the team, however we would be put in a very difficult position of needing to make cuts in other areas at a point where we have already reduced the team down to what we would consider a bare minimum necessary to continue at a reasonable rate of development.
Updates - Oct. 7th, 2024
The following updates are being made to the original proposal above after discussion and feedback from the SPS stakeholder community.
While the Secret of Praetoria Land expansion will be @cryptomancer's main priority, he may also be required to fulfill duties not directly related to Land as part of his employment by the DAO, such as code reviews for other developers, assistance with monitoring of production systems, team meetings, urgent bug fixes, etc. These items, along with his work on land, will be tracked in his timesheets that will be made available for the community to review on a monthly basis.
As part of this proposal, Splinterlands agrees to create two new promo cards after the currently authorized promo card sales are completed and sell or otherwise distribute them in whatever way the DAO instructs (within reason). The details of the two new promo cards and their sale/distribution will be determined via a future SPS governance proposal.
Since the DAO will now be directly paying for the development of a key piece of the Splinterlands codebase, as part of this proposal Splinterlands agrees to work with the SPS stakeholder community in good faith to find a mutually agreeable way to ensure that the SPS DAO will have access/rights to the Splinterlands codebase and all related assets and IP to ensure that they are in a position to continue to operate the game in the event that the company is no longer able to.