Responsible Funding Disclosure

We are releasing this blog post to provide transparency and clarity regarding the funding and operations of Crypto Risk Assessments.

The risk team initially received a semi-annual budget of 40,000 CRV from the CurveDAO Grants Council. All of the funding is spent on paying Analysts that research protocols. Reviewers and editors (core team) review research pieces pro-bono, a model similar to academia. This model has allowed us to achieve high efficiency with our available budget. Details about reports paid with this budget can be found at https://app.dework.xyz/vefunder-1.

The team's operations have grown thanks to our dedicated analysts and reviewers, who are committed to helping protect Curve. As the team has grown, it has made a concerted effort to develop sustainable business models to fund its growth and continue providing risk assessments. We sought to develop a business model where protocols would pay to ensure the timely delivery of a risk analysis report as part of their application for a gauge. This approach was modelled around audit companies, although our reports would have been completed and published regardless of payment or how unflattering the review may be.

The Cryptorisks team recently received feedback from community members on a transaction involving a transfer of 100,000 SILO tokens (~$4k at the time of transfer) from the Silo Finance treasury to the Cryptorisks multisig following our review of Silo Finance (archive link for Asset Risk Assessment: Silo Finance). Some of our readers believe it is in the best interest of the DAO that our work remain 100% Curve funded. We are happy to be scrutinized the same way we scrutinize protocols for our readers and take this feedback seriously. We are grateful for our community and are honouring this request. Going forward, we are working with the Curve Grants Council to address our budgetary needs for research topics pertaining to Curve.

Here are the specifics of that transaction:

1. The team received 100,000 SILO tokens on the CryptoRisks multisig wallet.

2. The received SILO tokens were then distributed, post-publishing, to the analysts involved in the research: 0xa61dfbdc24f910a8f73e70cffc4d527cc90bbf3c0842f5e1d9cb0c1957ea8c0f. The split of the transaction is described in the following.

   1. 12,500 SILO tokens (worth 500 USD back then) were distributed to each of the two external contributors who worked on the article.

   2. 25,000 SILO tokens were distributed to two Cryptorisks core contributors.

   3. The remaining 25,000 SILO tokens were distributed to the Vyper Core multisig wallet.

Out of the 75,000 tokens the core team and external contributors received, 50,000 tokens worth has been reclaimed and donated to the Vyper Multisig. We have decided not to rescind tokens from the external analysts themselves.

Here is a list of fund sources not involving the Curve Grants DAO:

1. March 2022: Angle Protocol paid ANGLE tokens (worth $100 at the time) to an analyst. The tokens were awarded two months post-publishing (Jan 2022) as a part of a community bounty program for writing research pieces on the Angle Protocol. The analyst struck no prior deal with the Angle Protocol team. 

2. Beyond Silo Finance, we have also made similar deals with Paladin and Liquity. These agreements have now been rescinded, and the team has not received any tokens from the mentioned protocols.

Conclusion

Following the feedback, we have decided to forego funding opportunities outside CurveDAO for the foreseeable future.

We want to thank the community for helping guide us on our path to ensuring the safety of DeFi users.

We also thank the Curve Grant Council for their financial support that allows us to continue our work on behalf of the DAO.