Team Name	PT Inc Protocol Team
Quarter and Year	Q4 2022
Payout Address	0x3927E0642C432A934a4EAA64C79bC8a1D8ac5Fb7
Total USD Value Requested (approx)	$43,041.44 USD

Purpose

The protocol team is tasked with designing, developing, and managing the core PoolTogether prize protocol. This includes:

• Designing and developing upgrades to the protocol
• Working with partners to support protocol integrations
• Implementing security best practices to ensure the protocol is safe
• Automating operational transactions to ensure the protocol runs smoothly

Merging Existing Teams

There are two existing “teams” that the protocol team will include: the Ethereum Operations Team and the informal security team.

The existing Ethereum Operations Team will be turned into the Protocol Team, with the only two active members being Brendan and Pierrick. The Eth Ops Team currently holds ~$250k in USDC held directly and across two Sablier streams. These funds will be re-purposed for use by the Protocol Team, and the other two signers on the multisig will be removed.

The informal security team is really just Brendan’s relationship with Code Arena. Several PTIPs in the past have transferred funds to Code Arena to top-up an account used for PT protocol audits. The account is used to fund core protocol changes, and the current balance is ~$156k USDC. Brendan will be leading the protocol team, so this account will be re-purposed as the auditing account for the Protocol Team.

Q4 2022 Performance Goals and Metrics

Over the next three months, the protocol team plans to improve the core PoolTogether V4. We will:

• Upgrade PoolTogether V4 to make it fully decentralized
• Continue research and development of V5
• Hire a additional developer

Decentralizing V4

The PoolTogether protocol version 4 currently uses OpenZeppelin Defender relayers to copy information from one chain to another. This means that if someone takes control of Defender they can manipulate the protocol. We wish to upgrade the protocol so that Defender is simply automating functions that can be called by anyone.

There are several parts to the upgrade:

1. Replace Draw oracle with bridges and local VRFs. ERC-5164 is part of our efforts.
2. Replace TVL oracle by upgrading V4 to use the Draw Percentage Rate. This eliminates the need to broadcast the TVL across all chains.
3. Eliminate Timelocks. By eliminating the above attack vectors, we can improve the user experience.

Milestones

1. Install VRF 2.0 on Polygon
2. Bridge draws trustlessly to Optimism (via ERC-5164)
3. Install VRF 2.0 on Avalanche
4. Upgrade V4 Ethereum to use DPR
5. Upgrade V4 Polygon to use DPR
6. Upgrade V4 Optimism to use DPR
7. Upgrade V4 Avalanche to use DPR

PoolTogether V5

With V4 locked down, we’ll be able to continue work on PoolTogether V5. This new version will extend the excellent V4 prize design with strong tokenomics that incentivize protocol growth. We will also be focusing on making the protocol permissionless and autonomous. This way no one needs to ask governance permission to extend the protocol, and we will reduce the number of PTIPs required to manage the protocol.

Performance Milestones:

• finalize V5 design
• deliver a public V5 testnet

Hire Developers

To realize these goals, we’ll need more developers. Another goal will be to hire another developer so that we can build faster.

Goal: hire another protocol engineer

Budget

Requested Amount

Total
43683.68 POOL

To Be Returned

Total
156,400 ScUSDC

Budget Breakdown

Team Members

List every role on the team with the following template:

Role	Yearly USD Compensation	Commitment Percentage	Quarterly USDC	Quarterly POOL	Contributor	Contributor Discord
Team Lead	N/A	100%	0 (covered by PT Inc)	0	Brendan Asselstine	Brendan 🌊🏆#1830
Protocol Engineer	$211,166	100%	0 (covered by PT Inc)	18,310.65	Pierrick Turelier	Pierrick#1350
Protocol Engineer	$250,000 (max)	100%	0 (covered by PT Inc)	25,373.03	Open Role

We will be hiring a Protocol Engineer this quarter, so we want to be ready with compensation. The above POOL is the maximum possible quarterly ownership for an employee (see the compensation formula spreadsheet) If we do not hire this quarter, we will roll the tokens over to next quarter. If we decide we don’t need to fill the role, we will return the tokens. If we hire they will likely be below the max, so we will return or roll over the remaining tokens.

Previous Budget Surplus

The Protocol Team will inherit a significant amount of budget from the Ethereum Operations Team and Brendan’s relationship with Code Arena. I estimate this budget will be sufficient for Q4 stablecoin expenses, and beyond.

Description	Amount	Token
C4 outstanding account balance	156,400	USDC
Held assets	320,000	ScUSDC
Remaining in stream	30,000	ScUSDC

Note: Token prices at time of budget request are used for standardization. For simplicity the relevant token prices are provided below.

Appendix

Token Pricing

Show the token prices used for any USD calculations.

Token	USD
POOL	0.985298