Building Pi’s Funding Model | Pi Network Core Team 🇺🇲

By the Pi Network Core Team 🇺🇲
Building Pi’s Funding Model :

In addition to the two main goals of Phase Two, one important supporting goal will be to achieve more sustainable funding for the project in order to accelerate development. This supporting goal is even more important now, given the volatility being caused by the coronavirus in the global financial markets.

As we embark on Phase Two, one natural question on people’s minds may be “When will we get to Phase 3?” (Mainnet). Two of the biggest variables that will determine how quickly the project can progress to the third and final phase are the financial and human resources that we have to get us there. The Core Team has been extremely lean over the first phase of the project. Today, we have a total full time staff of 8 on the Core Team supporting a community of over 4M Pioneers. That means that each core team member is supporting an average of 500K Pioneers!

While we’re proud of what we’ve been able to achieve with such limited resources, the lack of engineering horsepower has caused some of you to experience app outages, slower response time to bugs in the application, and restrictions in making certain features available to more Pioneers (such as phone verification outside of the U.S. and the U.K.) More sustainable funding will allow us to provide even more reliable and higher quality service to our growing global community.

Building and sustaining a project the scale of Pi Network is a costly endeavor. To give you a sense of cost, with Pi’s high amount of traffic maintaining our servers alone costs over $30,000 USD a month. The cost of just receiving text messages when Pioneers verify their phone numbers is already around $8,000 USD a month. The cost to send verification text messages internationally would have been about 10 times more. These costs would be significantly higher if we were providing the ideal level of service to the community and will grow higher as the number of Pioneers grows.

Given how important and sensitive this topic is, we want to build our plan for sustainably funding the project alongside the community. Over the last few weeks, we have started these discussions with the moderator community to get a sense of the best ways to help fund the project. So far, the easiest and least burdensome option appears to be in-app advertising, because they don’t cost money and they are pretty common on free apps.

While ads are a promising option, we would like the community’s feedback on ads as well as suggestions of how we could best implement them. With that said, ads may not even cover the cost of the servers, not to mention all of the other costs we incur while building Pi. So, we’d also like the community to submit ideas for additional avenues for funding the project. As you think of different options, please keep in mind the following guiding principles we would like to adhere to as we design Pi’s funding model:

Trust and integrity. Pi’s funding model should not compromise the trust and integrity of the project.
Equal access. Pi’s funding model should not compromise access for Pioneers with limited financial resources.
Transparency. Pi’s funding model should be transparent to the community.
Legality and compliance. Pi’s funding model should adhere as best possible to the relevant legal and regulatory regimes of our global community’s native countries.
As the community continues to grow and our focus expands to building value and decentralizing the network, the project will continue to require resources. We’d love to hear community suggestions on how we can more sustainably fund the project, given the guidelines provided above. We look forward to your ideas and feedback!