By beggars on Skatehive
Over the past couple of weeks, we've seen some DHF-funded projects have started publishing breakdowns of where their funding goes and openly discussing transparency. This is a good thing. Transparency has been a long time coming and the projects that are stepping up deserve credit for doing it. But as the numbers come in, a pattern is forming that the community needs to talk about honestly. Projects are reporting that 80-85% of their DHF funding goes to labour costs. Salaries. Payroll. Developer compensation. Whatever you want to call it. The overwhelming majority of community funds flowing to these projects is going directly into people's pockets as income. That's not inherently wrong. People deserve to be paid for their work. But the scale of it, the consistency of it, and the lack of any mechanism to evaluate whether those labour costs are justified by output, that's a problem. What the Numbers Actually Say When a project tells you 85% of its funding goes to developers, what they're