Transfer 16,900 ICP to OpenChat Labs for Nov and Dec 2025
We ask the OpenChat DAO to provide funding of 70,000 USD to OpenChat Labs Ltd for November and December 2025 to pay for the following:
- Team salaries
- Marketing
- Hosting
- Travel
- Equipment
- Administration
- Other expenses
We have not made our standard funding proposal for Q4 due to particular circumstances.
Dom asked the OpenChat dev team to join the effort to build Caffeine AI for a 2-month contract. Under normal circumstances we would have declined, however, due to the historically low ICP price we felt it prudent to accept. This has helped prolong the OpenChat treasury and drive forward Caffeine which is likely to help reinvigorate the ICP ecosystem.
Matt, Hamish and Ivan took the 2 month contract while Julian has continued to develop the OpenChat native apps according to the new designs and has made great progress. For those interested you can watch a short video showing the current state of the native app and even install the latest Android APK (disclaimer: this is work in progress and will be buggy).
Ivan has now returned to work on the OpenChat native app development alongside Julian, whilst Matt and Hamish are working a 3rd month on Caffeine AI.
With this in mind, we ask for this payment to cover our costs for the remainder of Q4.
Our focus for OpenChat remains the native apps and we anticipate releasing the Android app early in Q1 2026.
Our second priority is incorporating e2e encryption. This is a significant undertaking and we are very fortunate a crypto researcher / developer at DFINITY has been building an e2e encryption scheme for chats based on vet keys, and we will be able to directly use it. You can see his progress on github in this pull request. Due to the Caffeine contract extension, incorporating this into OpenChat will be pushed to Q1 2026.