Transparency is important for foundations. Especially for a project like Ravencoin that allows the community to contribute to bounties and projects that enhance the Ravencoin ecosystem.
Two separate events prompted me to write this article. First, it came to my attention that at least one person, was hesitant to contribute through the foundation to a project. They felt like the funds were not sufficiently accounted for, and that transparency was lacking. Second, foundation Board members, in an effort to help, had questions about the way the accounting was being done, which indicated to me that it isn’t as clear as it should be.
The Ravencoin Foundation has both USD and RVN. The USD, which was generously provided upon its creation by Overstock. The RVN held by the foundation is a combination of funds that were gifted to a multi-sig before the foundation existed with the purpose being for a legal fund, and other RVN gifted for projects, and security code audits.
The USD is used for infrastructure like AWS, SendGrid, Google Cloud, Digital Ocean, and others to run nodes, domains, explorers, monitoring, e-mail, mailing list, etc. It is relatively automated using Divvy and virtual credit cards that are paid by the bank account. Each Divvy virtual card has a budget limit, which occasionally needs to be adjusted based…