Over the last several months weāve worked on getting our books up to date, completing catch-up bookkeeping for 2020, 2021, and now weāre working on completing and then auditing 2022. Weāve engaged an accounting firm in Singapore to help us stay current from here on out.
Please receive this update on CY 2022 actuals for ENS Labs.
The line Iād like to highlight is Legal. Legal expenses were well beyond what we anticipated last year (and continue to be significant this year). We are working on strategies at Labs and with Meta-Gov stewards to address the legal needs of the ENS DAO.
We started receiving this stream from the DAO in July of 2022, so youāll notice a surplus as we didnāt staff up or start new initiatives at 2nd half of last year.
The legal feeās are astronomical why does ENS need Counsel would ENS labs care to elaborate on that?
Can you break down the 500k costs? I work with one of the best Chambers in the UK and half a million pounds would be feeās to save me 100x that. Put it this way, last time I spent over Ā£13k with my Counsel we saved around Ā£2m, maybe ENS labs should seek a different legal team?
Also, what is the compensation? $2.2m
$3.3m expenditure and not even 10% on development, am I reading that right, or is compensation Devās wages?
I think a breakdown would be helpful, in a very general and non-specific way to undwerstand, not only the legal aspect, but also things like āMarComā that are out of my lingo of knowledge.
Re: Legal - These are not costs related to operating ENS Labs but relate to ongoing litigation to protect/defend ENS DAO assets. Litigation is costly and sensitive so we cannot provide a breakdown of the fees at this time. We handle much of the āreal worldā issues facing the protocol/DAO so those costs show up in our financials.
Re: Compensation - Yes, most of this is wages for the devs!
Compensation - this line includes compensation/wages during calendar year 2022 for all ENS Labs core team members and contractors.
Reimbursements - refunds for operational costs paid by core team members. Some amounts in this line will get further categorized into other lines like tech stack, travel, general office.
Tech stack - Weāve started to ācentralizeā much of the operational costs and tech stack payments that were ādecentralizedā among team members. Everything from Front, to Notion, to Cloudflare and Google Cloudā¦ Thatās what this line represents.
Bugs/Audits - Cash payments to code auditors and some of you awesome bug hunters out there.
Legal - Canāt go into details on the costs but we have firms representing the ENS ecosystem based in Singapore, Cayman, and the United States.
Dues - We support efforts to promote good crypto/web3 legislation.
PR - Public relations work.
MarCom - Marketing and communications expenditures.
PSA that @khori.eth will be joining next weekās Meta-Gov meeting for those who may want to tune in live and ask any questions. Thank you Khori in advance for your time!
Thanks for the reply that makes a lot more sense. Sorry to hear that ENS has needed so much legal advice, I am sure most of us can guess its about US regulation, sigh! With luck everything is in order and the ship will not be rocked.
