Hi Shane, thank you so much for supporting LeanPOKT to start off with.
Yes, we agree with you on this actually. If we were to do perceived market value only (lost opportunity) then the asking amount would be much more. However, we are only asking the DAO to consider it as a factor. We do not have a precise percentage, but we know that node runners can make upwards roughly $100k-$300k/month USD during this time frame, especially those who had their own version of the “light client” at the time.
We were only able to operate a geo mesh client for less than ~3 months (roughly, can’t say for sure) and we were not even running it at a large scale as large providers today (2 regions initially). It wasn’t ready for production use either. Whenever we were asked questions on the protocol specifics and how to run a testnet by Poktscan, we helped. (very briefly! once again, credit to Jorge and everyone on the team for this invention). We even pointed out a memory bug that they could incorporate into Geomesh, which they did. Our team has always been open to helping and growing the ecosystem. We were actually considering releasing it OS open-source later down the road once it was scaled and tested, but Poktscan beat us to it and huge props to them.
I think in general we understand your point here, but building a business from literally 0 to #1 took a lot more work than providing great QoS using geomesh. We had to build a website, we brought in a fantastic relationship-building account manager, created fantastic competitive deals, and business development, we had to build our infrastructure and own node running tooling such as Nodies Monitoring which we also have an open source for everyone to use. It is a fact that we are generating revenue and ofc, won’t deny that, but we can’t fully attribute it to LP. We gave everyone adequate time to adopt LP and decrease their costs to be competitive. We are not asking for reimbursement for node running, but rather consider it as a factor when we were focused to bring this out to the masses for everyone instead of aiming for privatization as some other providers did.