Milestones & Budget
Four tranches over five months — 10% on acceptance, 20% at MVP, 30% at testnet complete, 40% at mainnet and UX readiness. $150,000 XLM equivalent total.
Tranche Structure
Each tranche has specific, verifiable acceptance criteria defined upfront. No deliverable is ambiguous or subjective. The first tranche explicitly requires the public repository to be live at submission — this is a hard precondition, not a post-approval task.
Development Timeline
Budget Breakdown
| Category | Amount | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Engineering — Alex Astrum | $54,000 | 5mo · SDK + CLI + AP2 validator + DX |
| Engineering — Drew Raines | $54,000 | 5mo · Soroban contracts + x402 + reference agents |
| Product & Ecosystem — Max Shama | $25,000 | Coordination · community · docs oversight · partnerships |
| Infrastructure | $8,000 | Horizon nodes · facilitator hosting · CI/CD · Docusaurus |
| Community bounties | $9,000 | External integrations in T4 · office hours |
| TOTAL | $150,000 | 100% development costs — no marketing, no token giveaways |
Engineering Hours Breakdown
Honest Budget Assessment
Two things stand out on scrutiny and are worth addressing directly rather than hoping reviewers miss them:
The Soroban contracts handle real user funds on mainnet. The budget covers only an internal threat model review plus a community audit request submitted separately. A formal audit by a recognized Soroban security firm would cost $15-30k and is not in scope. This is a conscious tradeoff — not an oversight.
$60,000 drops in month 5, which requires mainnet deployment, security review, three external integrations, a community builder guide, and a mainnet demo video — all in 30 days. If anything slips in T1-T3, T4 gets squeezed hard.
5 months, 2 engineers, 800 total hours for: a Rust Soroban contract, a 5-package TypeScript SDK, a CLI, a full docs site, testnet + mainnet deployment, and 3 external integrations. Doable — but there is no slack for unexpected complexity.