We were funded by Dfinity before they started the grant program, so rather than receiving lump sum payments, the model was that they paid our salaries up until we launched the SNS.
It is worth noting that during this time we also helped Dfinity a lot whenever they needed extra dev resources.
Once the OpenChat SNS launched we became fully self funded and independent from Dfinity.
We opted to give Dfinity an 8% stake in OC during the SNS sale, they didn’t request this themselves.
For the first 10 months or so after the SNS launch the price of ICP was around $3-5, overall, our average cash out price has probably been around $5 / ICP.
We probably should’ve cashed out more during the periods where the price has been higher, but we have always opted to only request funds from the treasury when they have been needed. I guess we could’ve swapped ICP for ckUSDC while keeping it DAO controlled, but unfortunately we didn’t.
So realistically we have probably burned through ~$1.5M in total.
In that time we have made 1813 proposals, far more than any other SNS (excluding the WaterNeuron proposals which are mirrored NNS proposals).
We have around 15k daily active users who between them send over 100k messages per day .
A few months ago we heard from the Internet Identity team that OpenChat now accounted for around 40% of all sign-ins to Internet Identity and had overtaken the NNS app to become the top source of sign-ins (despite the fact that sessions on OpenChat last 30 days and we offer many other sign-in options, vs 30 minutes for the NNS app).
We are relentlessly improving OpenChat. Take a look at the commits - Commits · open-chat-labs/open-chat · GitHub
OpenChat right now is a far superior product to what it was a year ago, and in a year’s time it’ll be far superior to what it is now.