Vesting Budgeting Framework

Most Alchemist products receive a monthly budget of MIST to be vested to their contributors. The budget amount is established by the Council on a per product basis and is based on a number of factors including: current amount of inflation available for funding, the team's value add to Alchemist, team size and needs, and the future potential of what the team is working on, other projects interested in an allocation of vested MIST funding, and the vested MIST that other teams are receiving within Alchemist. Teams are required to fully vest their budget to their contributors with a 3 year vesting schedule or return any excess unvested MIST back to the Council at the end of the month before unlocking any additional funding.

How team budgets are estimated

All Alchemist contributors are evaluated on an equal footing when receiving vested MIST, because the type of labor they perform in service to Alchemist is assessed relative to what other contributors are doing.

The methodology for arriving at the exact allocations of vested MIST is as follow:

1. The Council evaluated all the different kind of contributions performed by Alchemist contributors.

2. Next contributions were matched up with equivalent professions in a well developed job market. We specifically looked at New York city using public Glassdoor job market data.

   

   Using Glassdoor to gather data from an established job market

3. Afterwards these professions were matched to the salaries they received in NY. This enabled us to normalize salaries relative to each other. So if a Community Moderator is receiving $50,000 a year in NY while a Sr. Software Engineer is receiving $200,000 a year, we now know that within Alchemist the latter would need to receive 4x as much vested MIST as the former. This was performed for all types of roles within Alchemist.

   
4. We then used the role with the lowest compensation based on Glassdoor data as a unit of work to measure other roles against. So a Community Moderator would represent a 1, while a Sr. Software Engineer would be a 4. And if a business developer was receiving $110,000 they be a 2.1 (because 100,000/50,000 = 2.1).

   

5. Once we got the units of work for ALL the contributors within Alchemist receiving a stipend we then added them up and got around 128 units of work. This then enabled us to take the monthly amount of inflation that the Council Multisig receives and figuring out exactly how much vested MIST each of the contributors ought to be rewarded by. To simplify this estimate we assumed that all contributors are contributing an equal amount of time on a monthly basis.

The full document involved in performing this analysis can be viewed here.