Matrix-doc: Financial situation of The Matrix.org Foundation

[alohapersona]

_I wasn't sure if this is the right spot to raise this, if you want this to go somewhere else, just close here and suggest another location._

Is there any place where financial reports of The Matrix.org Foundation are published? Like, summary of income through donations, who is currently employed by The Matrix.org Foundation and how are funds spent outside of employments.

If such information already is public, I think it makes sense to link it on https://matrix.org/foundation/
If such information is not public yet, please consider to do it. After all, an organization collecting
donations should make clear to some degree how those funds are used.

[ara4n]

we haven’t published any financial reports yet but will do; the intention is to do them on an annual basis. there are no employees (which is part of the reason for limited reporting so far); currently all donations are being used to fund core dev work on matrix.

[alohapersona]

Great. Annual reporting makes sense, no need to create unnecessary overhead by doing too much reporting. I was just wondering as first year is already over (with foundation being founded in Oct 2018), but using calendar years probably makes more sense and for the 3 months of 2018, I assume there was nothing to report on.

no employees; all donations are being used to fund core dev work on matrix.

Can you share a list of people that receive those funds? Is it the same as this list? https://github.com/orgs/matrix-org/people

Thanks for the swift response!

[alohapersona]

@ara4n can you provide an update on this matter?

I found the following information on income/assets on the website of matrix.org:

• About $3000 donations through patreon per month
• About $300 donations through liberapay per month
• About $60000 donations in Bitcoin and Ethereum cryptocurrency (transparently visible on the public ledger)
• Sponsorship of status.im, upcloud, private internet access, INBlockchain, OmiseGO and Tendermint of unknown amounts.

[ara4n]

oops, sorry for missing the updates on this.

We just did the the annual accounts for the Matrix.org Foundation and should be able to publish them shortly.

To quickly answer the questions: The donated funds have ended up being used to pay for the hosting of the matrix.org website + homeserver; we haven't distributed any of them for development. Instead the Foundation has chartered New Vector (trading these days as Element) to run the infrastructure for the project, who do so for free (but under the governance of the Foundation's requirements). All development for Matrix itself is donated by the respective contributors, who retain copyright (apart from New Vector, who unilaterally assign their contributions to the Foundation, where they are held in asset lock by the Foundation). Finally, we're holding (hodling?) onto the cryptocurrency for a rainy day.