State of the Finances
The goal of the current MoonCatRescue team is to ensure the project remains accessible, understandable, fun, and appealing to all visitors and MoonCat owners. To do that, there are recurring costs for server infrastructure and business management software, plus paying the team members for the hours they put in.
The current cost breakdown is:
- $300/month: server hosting
- $200/month: business management
- $400/month: team wages
That amounts to an overall cost of about $900/month minimum to keep the project going. The MoonCatRescue team has only a moderate “nest egg” of savings, so has mainly met those expenses by marketplace royalty fees that trickle in on a continual basis. However, with the popularity of NFTs in general still in a slump, combined with marketplaces moving more toward removal of royalty fees, that means of supporting the project in that way is unlikely to be viable for the future.
Therefore, for the MoonCatRescue team to continue supporting the MoonCat community, we need some different income streams. We’d rather not go the “venture capital” route of trying to seek a large contribution of funds, but rather a “Patreon-style” month-to-month stream of smaller contributions that support us long-term.
Long story short: if you like what the MoonCatRescue team has been doing, please consider sponsoring us in one or both of the following ways:
- Start a stream of DAI to us on Arbitrum via Superfluid. This gives us direct funds we can rely on, not beholden to the whims of big marketplaces, and via a mechanism that doesn’t require you having a large lump sum of funds to donate all at once.
- Buy some Accessories for your MoonCat. Every Accessory purchase gives a percentage of the purchase price to the MoonCatRescue team, so all volume on the Boutique is helpful for supporting the team. For a larger impact, buying the Accessories that are owned by the MoonCatRescue team gives 100% of the purchase price to the team.
Details on how to give these sorts of sponsorships are on the Contribute page on the ChainStation site:
https://chainstation.mooncatrescue.com/team/contribute
For further details, and answer a few potential questions you may have:
Why is server hosting needed at all? I thought MoonCats were all on-chain! Just ditch that expense to save costs!
Yes, the data needed to generate all the MoonCat imagery is all on the Ethereum blockchain. However, we’re still in a phase of Ethereum adoption that most users and projects that interact with Ethereum still expect an NFT project to have traditional “web 2.0-style” servers hosting content about the tokens and about the project overall. And even though the information about the MoonCat assets themselves are on-chain, it’s a much better user experience to have a web interface tailored to MoonCat-related actions (e.g. ChainStation) rather than generic contract interactions (e.g. Etherscan). If the MoonCatRescue team were to shut down all their servers, you’d still own your MoonCat, but you would have to use more basic tools to interact with them, and sharing your collection with others would require much more effort on their part to see it. While that would “work”, it wouldn’t make the project be very appealing, and gathering new users to be interested in the project would be significantly harder.
The MoonCatRescue team will continue to work toward minimizing the server costs to keep that overhead as low as possible, while still providing good uptime for the content hosted there. The current hosting platforms need to be a few steps above value/basic/entry-level server hardware, to support the traffic that large marketplaces and other scrapers put on the site.
Why should I sponsor the MoonCatRescue team at all? Isn’t the whole premise of Web3 that everything’s decentralized and autonomous?
Yes, a key feature of blockchain technology is having a common infrastructure that allows different components to interact with each other automatically, in a trusted manner (trusting math, rather than humans). Anyone can create additional tools that interact with MoonCats and other aspects of the MoonCat ecosystem, however it becomes an issue of “just because everyone can, doesn’t mean everyone will”. It takes time and effort to create tools on blockchain technology, which can lead to a situation where everyone sits around waiting for someone else to start the ball rolling.
The current MoonCatRescue team has passion for the potential future of the project; enabling MoonCat owners to take full advantage of the possibilities their virtual pet provides them. We’ve demonstrated over the past year the sort of quality content we can create and would love to continue to have the means to do so. If there are others who are interested in making things within the MoonCat ecosystem, that would be great! We aim to support a “Do-ocracy”, where those who take the step to do something are empowered with the tools and encouragement to continue and allow the project to move forward with lots of hands making the work light.
Earmarking $200/month for each member of the team is a very small wage for the skill level and amount of hours the team currently puts in, so is a first milestone toward moving the team from volunteering their time, to getting a fair wage for their time.
Why not just open your own marketplace? Why not just fix the original Adoption Center UI interface and use that?
Overall, gaining an income from an adoption center/marketplace means gaining funds when MoonCats change hands. As a team, our overall desire is that MoonCats don’t change hands all that often; that people find a MoonCat they love and keep it, and it becomes part of their family long-term. Needing to spend business time/effort/money spurring activity on a marketplace just for the team to earn an income is counter to that overall goal. However, we do acknowledge there will always be some owners looking to find new owners for their MoonCat, and having royalties from those trades be a portion of the team’s income would be a good thing.
Creating “a marketplace” is a complicated set of code, and so rather than “reinventing the wheel” with a custom marketplace, the MoonCatRescue team has been evaluating existing marketplace platforms that can be integrated with the ChainStation application. Of the available options, the NFTX platform and the Sudoswap platform are key contenders the MoonCatRescue team will be focusing more on. Both those platforms give more control of the marketplace fees to the market participants, rather than the marketplace creators.
The original MoonCatRescue contract is not an upgradeable contract, and so the “adoption center” functions in that contract cannot be “fixed” directly. The concerns about front-running (which the big notice on the current Adoption Center page warns about) cannot be changed in the contract directly but could be aided with Flashbots or escrow/helper contracts that could be developed in the future.
This is a complicated idea, and we’re working on a MoonCat Monday presentation to delve into this idea further.
How can I track the MoonCatRescue team’s finances? What other ways can I contribute?
The MoonCatRescue team has a primary wallet address at team.mooncatrescue.eth, plus multisig Safe wallets at 0x1bca6975046bC1Da4B7a1F357b7D2207b563b6D1 on Mainnet and 0xf45349435c4A7cbb519987bd4d7460479568fD63 on Arbitrum. The MoonCatRescue team has a corporate Gemini account that is used primarily to convert cryptocurrencies to fiat and pay vendors that don’t support cryptocurrency payments.
The Contribute page at https://chainstation.mooncatrescue.com/team/contribute lists several other ways you can help the MoonCatRescue team both financially, and non-financially.
