Generally, I appreciate that this proposal tries to reduce the daily burden on the DAO and make the overall contract more sustainable. Lowering the daily payment from $5,500 to $2,000 is a meaningful improvement, and I understand that some compromise with SMC may be needed.

That said, I have serious concerns about the QPC structure as currently written.

My biggest issue is that the quarterly calculation seems to create timing-based upside for SMC while leaving the DAO with most of the downside risk. This is especially concerning around Core Set sales, but the problem is not limited to the first two months of a set sale.

The “Mid-Quarter Core Set Crossing” rule says that if a Core Set sale begins during a quarter, but the initial two-month window is not complete by the end of that quarter, the full $1,000,000 Core Set baseline is still included in that quarter. The following quarter then only gets the normal monthly baseline, minus one month, because the Core Set baseline was already absorbed.

I do not understand why this rule is needed.

Example:

Core Set launches in December.
Q4 sales: $300k
Q1 sales: $700k

Total Core Set sales: $1,000,000

In this example, the Core Set sale only met the expected $1M baseline. There is no real outperformance.

But under the current QPC logic, Q4 absorbs the full $1M Core Set baseline. Then Q1 may only have a small normal baseline, for example $60k. That means the January sales could appear to be far above baseline and trigger a 50/50 payout to SMC, even though the full Core Set sale did not actually exceed the expected $1M baseline.

However, even making the Core Set baseline follow the first two sale months would not fully solve the problem. It is unrealistic to assume that all meaningful Core Set sales will always happen inside exactly two months. If sales continue strongly into the third month, the same issue can happen again: the baseline may already be used up, and later sales may look like excess even if the DAO has not truly recovered from previous payments or underperformance.

That is why, in my opinion, the biggest problem is the “No Double-Counting” rule.

Once sales above the baseline are used to trigger a quarterly payment, those sales are locked and cannot be counted toward future baselines or future calculations. This makes the QPC too rigid and can permanently lock in an overpayment caused by timing.

If the proposal wants to keep a quarterly payment concept, then I think the No Double-Counting rule needs to be removed completely or heavily reworked. Each quarterly review should look at cumulative actual sales, cumulative baselines, and cumulative payments already made. If SMC has already received more than they should have based on the cumulative result, then no further payout should happen until the numbers catch up.