Summary:

This is a proposal to convert 500,000 DOT (about $640,000 USD) into USDT, with a 50/50 split between the Fellowship sub-treasury and the Fellowship salary accounts.

Rationale:

The Fellowship salary account was initialised on 5th December 2023 and received $1.8M USDT through OpenGov proposal #231 by 13th October 2024. The first salary cycle occurred on 17th January 2024 and there has been a gradual increase in the number of members claiming a monthly allowance ever since.

There is currently around 3 months of runway left in the salary account, however, the salary account should always hold enough stablecoins to cover members salaries for at least 6 months. This issue can be addressed by topping up the salary account at regular intervals.

Meanwhile, the Fellowship sub-treasury was originally funded with 2M DOT through OpenGov proposal #832 which was executed on 4th July 2024. So far, about 233,000 DOT have been disbursed to cover operations (meetings’ expenses, secretary salary) and technical developments (RFCs, RFPs, etc.).

There is a lot of friction and inefficiency involved in processing funding proposals because DOT volatility can curtail payouts and current setups steer proposers to include conversion/buffer fees in their funding requests. These issues can be solved by acquiring USDT for the sub-treasury account.

This referendum proposes to create an initial DCA proposal of 500,000 DOT for the Fellowship sub-treasury using the DCA wizard, as per the following parameters:

Encoded call data:
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