Thanks @BroccDaRock for the great questions. I’m going to try to go through them all here.
Who will have ownership of the work proposed here? Will Laguna Games have legal rights and ownership of the website, data, tools, and resources created by MerkleRoot inc. under the direction and compensation agreement laid out before us? I ask because I evaluate the value and cost of things like this differently if the LG and the community are able to change course over time compared to ‘Vendor Lock In’.
The ownership model here is joint. LG will have full legal ownership, code access, and data access. We strive to build software to the latest industry standards and documentation practices. This is mostly for our own sanity when it comes to working on products, but it also means it is easy for a client/partner to move to another developer. These technical details are subject to change, but right now we are looking at using micro-services in Go for all the observers, Elasticsearch for the data store, and React for the front-end.
Can you elaborate on the maintenance fee part of the proposal?
This is at least one full time devops engineer. They will be responsible for uptime, security patches, addressing bugs or other issues that can come up in production. This person is already lurking in the community 
Elastic Licences → $375/mo
Elastic Nodes → $0.0496 per GB/hr (40GB) * 3 Nodes (High Availability) → $4,285.44/mo
Kubernetes for DB and Observers → ~$400/mo
Misc → $200/mo
One of the reasons a custom market place is needed is because self custody of NFTs isn’t really compatible with the likes of OpenSea and projects that have some form of Locking requirement. LG / CU made a distinction in how in game NFTs are handled to ensure self custody of assets. This proposal is contrary to that concept / ideal. I can write may words on this subject as well, starting off with: Who is legally liable for loss of NFTs not in players custody?
We chose to go with a custodial model two main reasons. The first is time, we wanted the initial version of this marketplace to come online quickly so the community could start seeing progress and resolving some of their issues with OS. The second was security, this also relates back to time, a single contract in a well known and tested custodial model is much faster to secure and to audit. With all that said. We do know that the community likes to keep full custody of the assets. With that in mind we are planning to see if we can find a way to keep the assets in your wallet. This will require the meta data observer to be fast enough to detect a meta change and de-list the item, or prevent the completion of a transaction, before a transaction can go through. The meta can change in a single tick of the chain then the transaction in the second tick, so this is an abuse vector that needs to be closed. We may be looking to the community for guidance on what is an acceptable time frame. In the mean time, while we have custody, we can ensure you are getting what you payed for. (please forgive any grammar / runons, I’m still working on my first cup of coffee 
)
Will a new custody contract be written from scratch or do you have an existing contract as a starting point that has had some real world testing behind it?
We will be working off of the Open Zeplin ERC 721/1155 pausable contract. The marketplace functionality will be written as new work. We will be employing a 3rd party security auditing firm to audit the contract.
Shadowcorns, lootboxes, and badges are absent from the proposal. How experience is your team in creating expandable platforms? In the CU discord @sonolumin mentioned shadowcorns where left out due to time constraints. While I am far from a NFT expert my understanding is there are two broad feature sets. At a minimum it should be easy for such a market place to list and display the standard features of an ERC-721 token collection, much like OS currently does. Understandably decoding the ‘DNA’ of unicorns and lands is outside of that scope and would require enhanced functionally to be coded. I hope LG is able to offer code examples of how they mange this so your team is not revers engineering such things.
To slightly toot our own horn, we have lots of experience. The plan is to deploy the project using the diamond design pattern that also runs the main game. This gives us the ability to upgrade contracts without data loss (diamond storage). Secure deployment keys outside the digital world. And to allow an observer service separate of the blockchain cut off operation 24/7 if it detects any funny business (without having to give said service the super private deployment keys).
Its a fun topic to read up on if you haven’t: ERC-2535: Diamonds, Multi-Facet Proxy
EIP-2535: Diamonds · Issue #2535 · ethereum/EIPs · GitHub
Will an API be available the access the data used for filtering and or general sales and listing data?
Not in this PRD. We are not opposed to doing so, but would need to figure out some anti abuse mechanisms b/c the hosting costs is very much based on query volume.
What is the reasoning behind using weth as the transaction token?
Is it possible to support Matic as well? It really is a lot easier to get Matic on an exchange and avoid the eth / weth / weth on polygon education requirements.
This is what was requested in the PRD
All digital goods was mentioned, will that include buying and selling of RBW and UNIM tokens?
Yes! We are including swapping RBW-wETH and UNM-wETH within the market. We are also looking to incorporating MoonPayNFT pending feasibility and approval by LG.
It is a bit concerning the website registration is just a bit over a year old and there is no cooperate mailing address or phone number.
We do need to get those up on our website. The site has been a bit of a low priority thus far as we are staying busy on projects.
Merkle Root, Inc.
548 Market St PMB 53174
San Francisco, California 94104-5401 US
We are a fully remote team so this is an Earth Class Mail address. We are registered in Delaware. Please feel free to do some digital snooping.
We are a spin-off of First Foundry setup to focus on a fully remote team and to pursue more specific blockchain opportunities.
We do already work through a normal fee for service contract with LG on lots of the web products you probably use.
To the community, please keep in mind we are talking about giving the CEO of an unknown company half a Million real U.S. dollars and a guaranteed monthly income of $25,000 dollars with no parameters on Service Level guarantee in addition to the RBW discussed.
I think this is an important point, and I would like everyone to take a look at who we are, and feel comfortable both with giving us this grant and with having us be the steward of your marketplace.