| allow_curation_rewards | allow_votes | author | category | max_accepted_payout | percent_steem_dollars | tags | title | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
true |
true |
bitshares.fdn |
bitshares |
1000000.000 SBD |
0 |
|
BBF - Public Accounting - $180k Project Funding approved by BitShares Shareholders |
It is our pleasure to now publicly announce another major step for the BitShares Blockchain Foundation (BBF) towards transparency, openness and accountability.
Since we are in the fortunate position to have received sufficient trust from BitShares shareholders to successfully operate multiple escrow workers, we feel the need to be as transparent as humanly possible to these shareholders as to how the funds are used.
Thus, we started working with an accounting system that allows us to
- treat crypto currencies properly,
- publish the accounts balances and transactions in a way that is publicly auditable, and
- ensure we properly pay our debts and pay back unnecessary funds to the BitShares reserve fund.
After some research, we decided to use a plain text accounting system, in particular, we are using Ledger - the name kind of fits :)
You can find the accounting files published on github.com/bitshares-foundation regularly including a quick README that shows how to use these files properly.
Please allow us to briefly go through the tool before we show an overview of the books.
-
Show balance of all accounts
ledger -f ledger.ledger balance -
Show full register
ledger -f ledger.ledger register -
Show register of an individual account
ledger -f ledger.ledger register BitShares:Shareholders
In double-entry accounting systems, each transaction affects at least two accounts in a way that the amounts sum to zero. This means that "funds move from one account to another" while the transactions of a particular account are the actual register. This will become more clear when we go into details of the foundation's accounting.
Let us start with first describing what accounts we are looking into and what the hierarchy of accounts looks like:
BitShares # These are funds on the blockchain
Foundation # Accounts controlled by the foundation
bitshares.foundation # account `bitshares.foundation`
donations.bitshares.foundation # account `donations.bitshares.foundation`
workers.bitshares.foundation # account `workers.bitshares.foundation`
Shareholders # Funds obtained from the reserves (in BTS)
Operational # These are accounts to track USD terms of payments
Donations # How much did people donate (in USD terms)
TransactionFees # How much did we pay the network in transaction fees (in USD)
Outstanding # How much do we "owe" escrow workers in total
Proposals # How much have the workers been asking for initially
This hierarchy may be subject to change as we find more efficient ways to organize and use individual accounts.
The procedure of dealing with a worker proposal and its payment (if the shareholders approve the worker) is as follows.
- The worker pay is obtained through the
workers.bitshares.foundationaccount which has created the workers on the blockchain to begin with. - Then, the BTS are traded into USD in that account.
- Afterwards, USD are transferred into escrow by
bitshares.foundation. - Freelancers that applied for the worker/job get paid through
bitshares.foundationwith bitUSD (or possibly other bitassets)
It is important to remark that funds that are in
workers.bitshares.foundation are owned by the BitShares shareholders and not
technically owned by the foundation.
In order to keep track of which worker has obtained how many BTS (in the
workers.bitshares.foundation account), we make use of sub accounts where
possible (see below). These sub accounts only appear in the accounting and are
not reflected on the blockchain. After a worker has complete, we will thus be
able to directly say how many BTS have been obtained from reserves, how many
have been used to obtain USD and how many are to be returned to the reserves.
Currently, the worker account only obtains USD by buying them from the internal markets. These orders are recorded on the blockchain as well as in the off-chain books. These entries look like this:
2017/09/13 * Create Order for 201707-bsip18 into USD @ 10.434788520 BTS/USD
; 201707-bsip18 -50000.0 BTS @ 10.43479 BTS
; 201707-bsip18 4791.66395 USD
workers.bitshares.foundation:201707-bsip18 -0.01213 BTS @ 0.1092 USD
Transactionfee (0.01213 * 0.1092 USD)
P 2017/09/13 USD 9.69688187 BTS
2017/09/13 * Trade (#20011420)
workers.bitshares.foundation:201707-bsip18 -209.10550 BTS
workers.bitshares.foundation:201707-bsip18 21.5642 USD @@ 209.10550 BTS
Here, we created an order and payed a fee of 0.01213 BTS. Later on, this order is partially filled, obtaining roughly 21 USD by paying 209 BTS. There are plenty of those fill order transactions in each of the workers' individual ledger files.
The corresponding account's registers can be obtained with
ledger -f ledger.ledger reg workers.bitshares.foundation:201707
and looks like this
2017/09/13 Create Order for 201707-bsip18 into USD @ 10.434788520 BT.. BitShares:Foundation:workers.bitshares.foundation:201707-bsip18 -0.01213 BTS 273,166.59654 BTS
409.5059 USD
2017/09/13 Trade (#20011420) BitShares:Foundation:workers.bitshares.foundation:201707-bsip18 -209.10550 BTS 272,957.49104 BTS
409.5059 USD
BitShares:Foundation:workers.bitshares.foundation:201707-bsip18 21.5642 USD 272,957.49104 BTS
431.0701 USD
Moving those funds into escrow is done with an entry of this type:
2017/09/13 * Transfering to bitshares.foundation 201707-bsip18
workers.bitshares.foundation:201707-bsip18 -5000.0 USD
bitshares.foundation:201707-bsip18 5000.0 USD
workers.bitshares.foundation:201707-bsip18 -0.23131 BTS @ 0.1095 USD
Transactionfee (0.23131 * 0.1095 USD)
and results in a register entry similar to:
2017/09/13 Transfering to bitshares.foundation 201707-bsip18 BitShares:Foundation:workers.bitshares.foundation:201707-bsip18 -5,000.0000 USD 223,166.59654 BTS
269.9826 USD
BitShares:Foundation:workers.bitshares.foundation:201707-bsip18 -0.23131 BTS 223,166.36523 BTS
269.9826 USD
As you can see, every action on the blockchain that affects the accounts balance, is also recorded in our books.
With the help of ledger we can give a quick summary of the accounting and
individual balances. Let's dig into this real quick:
1 -346,596.06452 BTS
2 29,327.8038 USD BitShares
3 426,870.36824 BTS
4 29,327.8038 USD Foundation
5 3,196.46905 BTS
6 29,000.0000 USD bitshares.foundation
7 19,000.0000 USD 201707-bsip18
8 10,000.0000 USD 201708-bitsharesui
9 423,673.89919 BTS
10 327.8038 USD workers.bitshares.foundation
11 223,166.36523 BTS
12 269.9826 USD 201707-bsip18
13 197,571.74137 BTS
14 57.8212 USD 201708-bitsharesui
15 -606.98376 BTS 201709-steemfest
16 -773,466.43276 BTS Shareholders
17 -376,799.76836 BTS 201707-bsip18
18 -396,666.66440 BTS 201708-bitsharesui
19 12,745.1521 USD Operational
20 -1,000.0000 USD Donations
21 432.6521 USD TransactionFees
22 13,312.5000 USD WorkerProposals
23 -166,353.5000 USD Outstanding
24 -23,000.0000 USD 201707-bsip18
25 -4,000.0000 USD chainsquad
26 -19,000.0000 USD cyrano
27 -136,687.5000 USD 201708-bitsharesui
28 -121,687.5000 USD bitshares-ui
29 -15,000.0000 USD chainsquad
30 -6,666.0000 USD 201709-steemfest:roelandp
31 179,666.0000 USD Proposals
32 23,000.0000 USD 201707-bsip18
33 150,000.0000 USD 201708-bitsharesui
34 6,666.0000 USD 201709-steemfest
35 --------------------
36 -346,596.06452 BTS
37 42,072.9559 USD
This gives an overview of everything going on on the blockchain. Those numbers won't directly appear anywhere on the blockchain, tho.
Total funds in control (not owned) by the bitshares blockchain foundation.
Total funds in account bitshares.foundation. The BTS are for operational
costs (tx fee) while the USD are separated into subaccounts for each individual
worker for which the BitShares Blockchain Foundation is escrow for.
Funds in account workers.bitshares.foundation. This account is owned by the
BitShares shareholders and used to track claiming of worker pay as well as
trading. There is a separation into subaccounts for each individual worker.
These are the BTS that have been obtained from the BitShares reserves for each individual worker (and in total)
Total operational (more or less meaningless number)
Donations that have been made to the foundation
Transaction fees that have been paid (in USD). Technically, most of those fees occur in the workers account when creating actual workers on the blockchain. Thus, those fees are mostly paid by BitShares shareholders.
Funds that have been paid to Worker proposals (these are separated into Proposals and Outstanding)
Outstanding payments to approved worker proposals separated into worker proposals as well as involved entities (for worker, review, accounting, management, etc.)
These are the funds asked for in total by all worker proposals, separated into the individual workers.
We would like to highlight a few points in what we were able to achieve in recent months:
- Proposals worth almost 180k USD have been approved and are covered by the foundation
- Over 13k USD have been paid out to freelancers already
- 700k BTS have been claimed from the BitShares Reserves of which over 420k BTS are unused in the currently covered workers.
- This means that 60% of the funds in the worker account will probably be returned to the BitShares Shareholders (after the individual workers have terminated)
- 1000 USD have been donated to
donations.bitshares.foundationso far. - Over 430 USD have been paid as transaction fees of which 240 USD are used to create workers and 177 USD have been paid to upgrade the workers account.
In the outstanding worker operational costs for workers, you may have noticed that a fraction of the payouts (except for the steemfest worker) is asked for by the chainsquad account owned by ChainSquad GmbH. This fee covered the technical management of workers as well as developing automation for maintaining reoccurring tasks to facilitate escrow workers more efficiently over time. As these tools near completion, the fraction asked for in order to develop automation and development tools will drastically decrease.
Additionally to management tools, the code produced by freelancers needs to be reviewed by 3rd parties before funds can be released. This ensures that the produced code fits into the high quality standards of the existing code base. It is our wish to be able to hand over the work of auditing code to more and more entities (companies and individual high-profile developers) to grow the knowledge of the underlying technology. Hence, if you have a profile of providing excellent code review and have experience in the Graphene library, you may want to contact the BitShares Blockchain Foundation.
In the future you can expect regular updates on the accounting of BitShares Blockchain Foundation to ensure the highest standards in transparency and accountability. We feel the deep desire to support the BitShares community and ensure that uncertainties that appear are covered and resolved as quickly as possible.
Further, we hope that we can continue to grow our reputation within the BitShares shareholders and the whole community to receive sufficient trust to do what we are planning to do with BitShares.
If you want to support our efforts, please don't hesitate to get in contact
with us ([email protected]) or donate to
donations.bitshares.foundation. We would like to emphasise that the BitShares
Blockchain Foundation is a registered non-profit entity in the Netherlands
which means that all funds donated will need to go into following our
foundations' goals: Growing BitShares.