$40k doesn't seem particularly shocking to me. If you have a team of 5 working on developing the thing that'd be roughly what your own team cost you for 2 weeks anyway (counting salary, benefits, leave, equipment, office space and overheads).
You're effectively hiring highly trained engineers to join your team for 2 weeks at that price. People who read and break crypto every day and who've been doing that for a fairly large amount of big companies and for various kind of projects.
