Hey Julian to answer your first point, yes it really cost $3M to fund Liqwid development for 1 year. I have included a 12 month budget here showing the full cost breakdown across all Liqwid Labs departments including non-engineering roles. Liqwid salary rates are competitive with other Fintech and DeFi startup engineer salaries and Liqwid engineers are some of the most talented devs in crypto.
Liqwid Labs now has 13 full time software engineers across Haskell engineers who write Plutus smart contracts, Typescript engineers who work on the offchain contract code, Frontend engineers who build apps and APIs for Liqwid and DevOps engineers who operate and maintain the cloud infrastructure that powers Liqwid oracle bots and liquidation engine. We also have project and product managers who design, spec and implement new features full time (this includes all of the new features implemented in v2 and all of the new features outlined in the 12 month roadmap article).
