These are my initial thoughts on the budget presented.
Legal costs, incorporation (have you looked into Otonomos btw?), accounting and insurance all seem like operational costs that shouldnt really be part of a grant, and also seem eyewateringly high (but I guess the US is pretty litigious)
The others look quite reasonable*, however the gap between the estimated cost of OpenAI credits ($450k) and the grant allocation for this ($41k) is large at less than 10% of estimated costs. I take onboard the commentary about openAI reducing pricing and that additional funding will be sought as the protocol grows, but this seems like a gamble. Have you looked at the option of working with BitTensor - although I appreciate it may not be mature/stable enough at the moment?
*277tx per block referenced in the Alchemy scale element seems astonishingly high, but I’m probably misunderstanding what it is actually doing and I guess these arent transactions in the sense that I would use the term.
Sorry, I didn’t realize you were waiting for me to respond. I was hoping others would share their thoughts first. It’s great that a budget is laid out and definitely something that needs to be done as you work on building this project. This would help the DAO decide whether or not it’s worth funding. However, I do think it is a large request for a new project with two people to ask for complete funding from salaries, all legal costs, IT, their internet bill, etc. I’m not sure I’ve seen that before. I think most project leads have some skin in the game and they would be building with their own funds and may ask for grants and investors after they have built some proof of concept. So a lot of risk for any DAO or investor to take on now.
My initial response is it’s still a significant amount of funds and I’m not convinced this project will pick up enough traction. The most challenging aspect of it is building something that attracts new crypto users and making them feel comfortable and understand the need for the recovery process. However, this is just my opinion and I’m just one token holder of UMA.