Confio’s New Path
Why Confio stops building Public Goods for now, and where should we go from here?
Status Quo
Confio provides fundamental technologies; we have been doing our best to keep every tech we are developing up-to-date, coordinating with Cosmos SDK and IBC maintainers. The beneficiaries of Confio tech are not only blockchains that integrate CosmWasm modules but also dApp builders in Cosmos who can reduce development time by far with CosmWasm standard library and CosmJS.
Confio does not run a blockchain or a DeFi protocol. We have provided paid consulting services for various projects such as Osmosis, Tgrade, and WYND, but these are not owned or operated by Confio and do not serve as sustainable funding for our Public Goods work. Unlike Ethereum EVM, Polkadot Substrate, or Cosmos SDK, we are not funded by a foundation that raised big ICO.
We have been happily providing free support to many chains, projects, and developers to expand the Cosmos ecosystem as a whole. And CosmWasm is probably the best-known development of Cosmos in 2022.
The needs of the CosmWasm and CosmJS stack have been increasing with the amounts of users and the growth of the ecosystem. We can no longer afford to subsidize CosmWasm as it has grown too large.
Unfortunately, we have not received any funding for our Public Goods work in the last four months since October 2022.
For the last couple of months, the appetite to donate funding to Confio’s Public Goods work, including CosmWasm, CosmWasm Academy, and CosmJS, had decreased.
Developers value it. Businesses don’t.
We have reached out to almost every CosmWasm-enabled chain and several larger projects, but it is extremely tough to find any funding for providing general utilities for the ecosystem.
Our Position
We have come to the conclusion that ‘altruism’ does not work.
To escape from the ‘slow death,’ we need to focus on work that pays us while we still have some reserves. Many people have advised us to “monetize” CosmWasm in the past, but we see no way to charge for the source code or license the core libraries while remaining at all relevant to public multi-chain world.
We had believed that blockchains’ financing models provided a solution to the ‘Tragedy of the Commons”, but sadly it doesn’t seem to be much different than other sectors.
We will focus on some offers for consulting work to build some interesting products on top of the CosmWasm stack. This provides clear, direct value to the customer and a clear income stream for us.
We are also looking into building out some off-chain developer tools to increase productivity as a paid product. And considering other services, we can provide that have a clear, direct value proposition.
We will halt all Public Goods work as of February 1st, 2023, until this is again a viable income stream for Confio.
(If your boss hasn’t paid you for 4 months, would you keep working for free?)
Stopping Public Goods Means
- No more releases or PRs on CosmWasm, wasmd, CosmJS, or other libraries.
- No work to complete Cosmos SDK 0.47 support. (either in wasmd or CosmJS)
- No responsible disclosure process in case of security incidents.
- No developers to work on improving the documentation.
- No free support when blockchains have issues, at the events of chain halts, etc.
- CosmWasm Academy cohort #3, which starts on February 13th, will be continued, but with the existing contents, no more new material.
What We Need To Resume Public Goods
We need a solid, dependable stream of income for Public Goods before we resume such general development. It takes a large amount of energy to constantly run around looking for funding. And changing gears costs a lot of energy and focus on the company as a whole. It took us months to get to this point; we need confidence before we go back.
We look for a down payment of $1 million for our past unpaid work and as pre-payment for a full quarter of focused Public Goods development, along with reliable partners ready to commit to long-term funding sources and who understand our value proposition.
Why?
- Confio has a burn rate of a bit over $ 2 million per year, with about 25 employees and freelancers.
- We have worked 4 months unpaid from Q4 2022 til January 2023, and we need at least 3 months more secure payments to resume focus.
- We have lost promised public goods funding twice from two different entities in 2022. We need to see the funds in our bank/wallet to rebuild trust in Cosmos.
So, What Can We Do For You?
If you want our support for your projects- be it blockchain, extra developer tooling, and more - please reach out to us; we are happy to discuss potential collaboration and move on from there.
The focus will be on supporting your projects’ needs, and we would like to prioritize long-term partnerships over piecemeal work.
