Now that the first two weeks of the ether sale are over, and over 50 million ETH has been sold, we intend to soon make a transaction to begin using the funds to repay loans and kickstart the process of setting up our development hubs and expanding our staff. We have made a commitment to be highly transparent about how we spend the funds, and that is a commitment that we intend to live up to; to that end, we have already released an Intended Use of Revenue chart and a roadmap to show how we intend to spend the BTC. More recently, the community has followed up with a wonderful infographic on CoinTelegraph using the information that we have posted. Now, we intend to release some additional information about the nature of our first withdrawal transaction.
The intent is to withdraw 4150 BTC from our exodus address within the next 48 hours. We reserve the right to withdraw up to 850 BTC more if needed before the end of the 42 day duration of the sale, but at this point it is likely that the remainder of the BTC in the address will remain unused until the sale ends. Of this amount, 2650 BTC will be distributed to pay for loans for prior expenses. Individuals who have contributed loans to the project will receive repayment in BTC directly; “we” will not be selling any portion of this 2650 BTC on exchanges ourselves, although individuals may choose to independently convert the BTC that they receive into fiat after the fact. Individuals also have the choice of taking the repayment in ether; in those cases, we will simply not send the BTC, and once all repayments have been processed we will publish all of the additional ETH that has been sold in this way (note that this is equivalent to sending individuals their BTC and letting the recipients send it right back into the exodus). The remaining 1500 BTC will be sent to a wallet controlled by ĐΞV, our development arm, and will be used to establish our sites in Berlin and Amsterdam and begin hiring developers; some of this amount may be converted into EUR, GBP or CHF (eg. to pay for rent), and the remainder will be held as BTC.
The following spreadsheet provides a rough categorization of how the backpay and forward-pay expenses are to be ultimately distributed.
https://docs.google.com/a/ethereum.org/spreadsheets/d/1yqymLKNf9tIbArjYrKhEf-IvNmgA6FfvhjnqH_nO_ao/edit#gid=0
The largest category is pay for individuals, covering core developers, web developers and art, communications, branding and business development, and among the expenses the largest is legal at 111,000 (including a $16,500 security deposit which is theoretically refundable and pre-payment up to Feb 2015) and the other categories you can see for yourself by looking at the chart. Going forward, the primary change is that expenditures are now going to be much more focused on paying for development. Our intent is to have our development centers in Berlin and Amsterdam, with a smaller presence in Toronto and London to cover communications, marketing and branding; the extent of our presence in San Francisco / Silicon Valley and possibly other locations is still to be determined and will be done based on cost-benefit analysis.
Additionally, note that the distribution of the endowment is quasi-public; although names of all individuals are not published (though everyone is free to disclose their own portion voluntarily, and the owners of the largest pieces can be partially inferred from public information), the percentages are available for view at https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1GS9pzSdMx9lK0XGSKEDr_aoi02riq3MPRyvEntVUm68/edit#gid=0. In the future, we intend to continue to uphold and step up our commitment to transparency, releasing details on how funds are being spent and on the progress of the project; if you are interested, feel free to follow our blog and the public blockchain.
