The month of August has been eventful as ever for the grants program. We have had many new projects gain approval and received several proposals for strong prospects in the month of September. As part of our commitment to transparency, we have made our grant application assessment documentation available to view on our notion page or directly linked here. This allows the community and potential grantees to see our decision making process for approving or denying applications.
Read on to see who has been recently approved and where our existing grantees are up to.
New Live Grantees
The total amount of applications of this wave has reached 46, with 19 followed up and 6 projects approved for grants at a total of ~25,300 BAL.
New live grantees this month are:
Ithil
Ithil empowers DeFi users to run complex strategies in a single click, using their own and/or borrowed funds on a variety of external protocols. This grant is to create a strategy based on Balancer and Aura. Ithil is preparing to launch their open testnet at the beginning of September running two mock strategies aimed at testing the protocol core and the UI. They have began development on the Balancer strategy but are already receiving a lot of valuable feedback from their users.
Boot Finance
Boot Finance has begun diving into building their custom pool implementation on the Balancer v2 repository. Their efforts are focused now on the coordinating efforts to align with the recent refactoring of the repo. The coming steps for them include deploying on Goerli testnet in an estimated 2 month time horizon, as well as building out the user interface for the Under Writing Market Maker style pools.
Multifarm Dashboard
Multifarm has submitted a first pass and begun refining the design of a veBAL dashboard to bring all the relevant information into one easy to read platform. Working with the Balancer team to ensure all relevant information is included, the dashboard design will be iterated until we can approve and get into the development and launch. We hope to be sharing a sneak peak into the design soon.
Nicolas M — Back up UI for Balancer
Nicolas thus far has presented several preliminary styles of the alternative user interface, which can be seen here: http://balancer-ui.mywire.org/. The inclusion of light & dark mode, liquidity staking and unstaking, and integration with the Balancer subgraph has begun during the past month. Along with the building out of the UI, Nicolas has been concurrently proposing adding relevant functionalities to the Balancer SDK.
Valory / Autonolous
Valory’s progress so far has largely been in getting all their ducks in a row. The Valory team has been focused on accurately estimating timelines, allocating resources internally, getting those resources up to speed on the project and finally going through the proposal with a fine-tooth comb and fleshing out missing details. Valory also very much appreciated receiving the Managed Pools contracts from Balancer’s side and being able to factory those into their plans.
Grantee Updates — Building
The program is proud to present our grantees and their updates in alphabetic order:
Atlantis World
Atlantis has had a busy month on several fronts. They have successfully integrated with and deployed an Optimism network city and expanded their user base greatly. The BAL building is ready and their team currently has in game NPCs that players can interact with to vote on Balancer’s Snapshot. Current development is integrating all balancer trade UI updates into the clubhouse as the existing interface is from pre-veBAL implementation. This is near completion, and the next milestone to tackle will be incorporating quests to learn about Balancer into the game.
Cron Finance
Cron Finance is developing TWAMM on top of Balancer via custom pools. They successfully prototyped TWAMM specific virtual order features and created a private repository holding their preliminary pool implementation. A TWAMM simulator has been confirmed by the Balancer integrations team and Cron is well on their way to producing a full functioning TWAMM. The team is currently closing out their gas optimization and API functions before closing out this first phase of work. Next steps they are focused on leveraging advanced Vault features, in-depth numerical analysis, and completing security reviews before their beta release in the upcoming months. You can learn more about their progress on their twitter: https://twitter.com/0x70626a. Their monthly blog post is up and as always is a very informative discussion about TWAMM generally and their implementation @ TWAMM Research: July 2022 — 0x70626a.
Javier Balancer SDK
Javier is working closely with our technical mentor John Grant (jguk) to expand our SDK. So far Javier has submitted a PR with tests coming to an agreement for the poolFactorysubmodule API with creation and initial liquidity provisioning. Remaining milestones are to implement poolFactory.create functionality and finally poolFactory.initJoin function to add initial pool liquidity. Javier has most recently merged a branch and is working through failing tests, errors, and other troubleshooting tasks.
RealEstate.Exchange update
RealEstate Exchange is awaiting for managed pools to become accessible and has finished all the features and UI work, and is preparing for the launch of managed pools in order to integrate tokenized real estate assets into a dynamic custom architecture. On the project front they are getting the verification/KYC flow to work and working on their UX after feedback from clients (property developers) to help “sell” their properties better and get liquidity in these pools with real estate tokens in them.
Tracer DAO (Grants 1&2)
Currently building out the ERC4626 compliant Balancer LP token vault. This vault takes in Balancer LP tokens and compounds rewards in the native token. This will enable us to settle derivative markets in BLP tokens. Once this is ready and deployed, which we expect to be within the next month, the Tracer team will be working on the UI to enable Balancer / Tracer users to deploy markets using these ERC4626 wrappers.
Verified Network
Verified has been working with Balancer to develop custom pools for issuing and trading regulation compliant security tokens. The custom pools integrate traditional financial service workflows with Balancer’s decentralized exchange. Two pools — one for issuing new tokenized assets, and another for trading tokenized assets have been fully implemented. Since these pools are integrated to traditional finance organizations and workflows, the pools are managed by an integration to our platform that connects to traditional financial institutions such as investment banks, brokerages and asset managers. Updates for August ‘22:
- A custom pool that supports new issues of tokenized securities (primary issue pool) is fully implemented. This pool supports price formation within a price range defined by underwriters. Investors can subscribe to new issues and subscription is integrated to traditional financial services workflow for KYC and allotment of tokenized securities.
- A custom pool that supports trading of tokenized securities allotted to investors (secondary issue pool) is fully implemented. This supports market and limit order management and integrated to settlement processes of traditional financial services companies.
- The subgraphs for the primary and secondary issue pool are implemented and have been reviewed by the Balancer team.
- Both pools have been integrated to the SOR and the review is going on.
- The UI / application listing pools and enabling joins (underwriting for primary issues, liquidity provision for secondary pools) and swaps is implemented for applications on the Verified Network which is exposed to investors. A separate UI where investors can subscribe using a walletconnect supported wallet is in the works.
XS Finance
XS Finance is building out Time Weight Asset Market Manager (TWAMM) functionality for Balancer. The goal of TWAMM functionality is to execute large trades over a period of time in a way that reduces slippage and gas cost for the party executing a swap. The first phase (finalizing the approach and specifications) has been completed along with most of the second phase focusing on implementation. Local testing has been completed to be deployed on a testnet with assistance from BLabs. The team is working on their web app before final testing and deployment.
Finalized Grants This Wave
We have had a number of grants that have successfully reached all their milestones this wave. In addition to these, there are 2 grants which have finished before all milestones had been successfully delivered. They are discussed below:
Forta / Nethermind
The grant was awarded to Nethermind to develop and implement Forta bots for security and real-time monitoring on Balancer smart contracts. Nethermind has delivered the 9 bots aligned with their grant timeline and updated the bots upon receipt of feedback from the Balancer DAO upon deployment. The deliverables were excellent and exactly what was promised by the Nethermind team in their application. These were easily deployed through the Forta app on Polygon and provide alerts directly to a dedicated, public Discord channel monitored by the community and Balancer DAO.
Read Forta’s post regarding the grant here.
Stefan (Delphereum)
Stefan has begun this grant in May with the goal to add full Balancer V2 support to Delphereum. Delphereum is a web3 implementation for the Delphi programming language that allows for development of native dapps. To date, the Vault is almost entirely implemented, including batch swaps and events. He has developed an app for macOS and Windows that demonstrates the progress which can be viewed here: Release v1.0.5 · svanas/balancer · GitHub.
This month, Stefan has wrapped up the demo app, wrote a medium.com article, and published it on ethereum.org to finish out the grant. Read more here: Ethereum for Delphi developers | ethereum.org
mkflow and the Balancer Newsletter
mkflow is a long time contributor to the Balancer DAO and this grant is to continue producing the Balancer Report weekly through August. The report is sent out weekly to subscribers and provides a detailed overview of the Balancer ecosystem that week including network TVLs, LP revenues, major news and governance votes. You can subscribe to this report or read recent publications here. With the publication of 5 newsletters this grant has been successfully delivered.
Financials
At time of writing BAL @ $6.60 USD
See the original medium post from the grants team here.