Balancer Grants January 2023 Update

Service Providers Grants
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Balancer Grants Wave 7 Update (Monthly Update #12)

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The BAL Grant Program is one of the ways that BalancerDAO promotes the development of the Balancer Protocol and Ecosystem. The Grants Service Provider proposal posted in the Balancer forum was approved through the successful snapshot vote by veBAL holders, funding this quarter of grants. The current wave will run until the end of March and the vote for grant wave 7 has given the program 70k BAL to be allocated towards grants for this current round!

New Live Grantees

The total amount of applications of this wave has reached 34, with 9 progressing to the next stage and 6 projects approved for grants at a total of ~25,928 BAL.

New live grantees this month are:

In a combined grant with Aztec, Balancer Grants is funding Blockful to integrate Balancer’s infrastructure with Aztec’s rollup. This will allow users to join select pool’s through zk.money to manage gas costs and their privacy. Read more here.

GammaSwap is a new project which is integrating with multiple AMM’s to permit users to hedge against impermanent loss. Their strategies will offer option like exposure to users and is particularly exciting with Balancer because of the variation in constant product weighted pools Balancer offers, which no other AMM’s do. See the announcement here.

Yearn Finance being a “household” name for the Defi space is bringing a familiar vote escrowed, liquid wrapping system to Balancer. yBAL will be the Yearn implementation of this wrapper, and be delivered in tandem with LP-yBAL and vl-yBAL contracts in order to maintain a sustainable flywheel with flexibility for individual participants. The grants team is happy to welcome them to our ecosystem. Read the full announcement here.

  • Cosme Fulanito

Cosme is continuing to provide support to Balancer’s Spanish speaking community. Making Balancer’s tech more accessible to all is a key goal of the DAO and Cosme’s work exemplifies this. Grants is funding 4 months of support and translations.

mStable is championing the ERC4626 standard for tokenized vaults which Balancer uses on Linear pools which are the basis of Boosted Pools. We join a number of other protocols assisting the funding of this alliance with the intent to encourage collaboration and further improvement of this standard.

Finalized Grants

  • Xeonus — Wave 5

We could not be more impressed with the finalization of Xeonus’ grant building out his analytics site. We highly encourage all Balancer users to check it out:

A very productive month comes to a close with the launch of the Balancer Analytics Beta: https://balancer.defilytica.com/
The site now includes all features that I had envisioned for the grant and I am very happy how it turned out. You can now browse all relevant data such as protocol wide metrics, pool and token stats. I am also very happy how the new components like the DAO financial dashboard turned out. Those sites will provide the DAO and its users with the needed transparency in regards to operational costs. Furthermore, I explored novel optimization layers like subgraph caching solutions. They are not fully there yet for prime time but give a glimpse of what is possible in terms of creating a responsive and informative analytics site. Please don’t hesitate to reach out to me for feature requests or bug reports as I will continue to improve the site for the months to come.

Multifarm has partnered with Balancer to build a custom analytics dashboard around the new tokenomics -veBAL. We have been in close contact with the grants team all throughout our development. We have completed several milestones successfully. We designed the UX, built the Frontend and completed the Backend. We are now ironing out the last few kinks before shipping the dashboard. Upon completion, our dashboard will offer many new data points that cannot be found elsewhere.

This has been an incredible journey for us. veBAL is having great success and we are witnessing it first hand. Balancer Grants team is brilliant and we really enjoy working them. We are also really excited to ship the Dashboard and share our work with the community as we think it will provide a very critical infrastructure for Balancer. We hope that Balancer community also enjoys our work.

Grantee Updates — Building

The program is proud to present our grantees and their updates in alphabetic order:

Currently Atlantis is preparing to open source our custom built Balancer front end for the web3 developer community, making it easy for anyone to:
a) Operate a simplified Balancer protocol front end, ie by self hosting, resulting in an unstoppable interface that’s easy to use
b) Directly integrate Balancer directly into their own product experience without much trouble

Some things to look forward to in 2023

  • Spatialized web3 social
  • Perpetual gathering space for BAL community with easy, memorable link
  • Gamified education about Balancer ecosystem
  • More sign-in options, ie join as a guest or sign in with another social profile (like Twitter, Discord etc), vs only Metamask / WalletConnect
  • Mobile
  • Better hangout & events experience
  • Atlantean characters in-game

Boot’s team is formalizing the mods to make then more suitable for a pull request, just in case that needs to happen. They’ve still got to build forms for managing the customswap pool once deployed. Once Boot gets beyond the above issue they’ll hopefully have Goerli in a community-testable version within a couple weeks +/- whatever internal debugging they uncover from now until then.

Cron Finance is in the final phases of TWAMM development. In the past few months, they’ve achieved feature completion, contract optimzations, gas usage reductions, and began numerical analysis. The code is being audited by SpearbitDAO, and pending a successful audit V1 of TWAMM will be launched by ETH Denver

Cron Finance has been working on this since November 2021 and is nearing completion. They have been posting detailed, regular updates to their blog and twitter covering their progress to date. Latest update from December ’22 here.

Dynamo is approaching the completion of their vault infrastructure development process and estimate their work will be ready in early February. With the vault development process coming closer and closer to completion Dynamo is doing their research in regards to security audits with various choices under consideration. At the same time Dynamo is engaging in strategic planning and bizdev activities in order to ensure the growth of Dynamo once we go live.

Hello web3 wizard enjoyers and enthusiasts, we have a quick update for you on our progress. As you know, we starting going through a restructuring of our core architecture recently: this change enables support for loans for an arbitrary number of tokens, meaning that users can take full advantage of the multitoken pools on Balancer.

Development is moving along at a steady pace, and we’re on track for our next major milestone. We will deploy the testnet with the upgraded core architecture and UI in March. Barring any unforeseen circumstances, our go-live will happen shortly after.

Kassandra is on a very steady road to concluding the development of an interface for Managed Pools.

This past month we deployed Kassandra Controller and helper contracts on Görli with Balancer Managed Pools Factory and started integration tests. The development of the interface for Managed Pool creation was concluded, and internally we’re already able to create Managed Pools.

Our product team has concluded the design of the Manager Dashboard for keeping up and updating Managed Pools, and our frontend team is starting the development of the flow to change assets and allocations inside the pools.

We have concluded the research phase resulting in an open source machinations model for a Balancer pool where token engineers can visually learn and experiment. Created by @curiousrabbit (Twitter)

Evan Kim has written a detailed research around managed pools and risk control.

Next month Symmetric is set to start development.

This month the swap screen has been finalized: Balancer - Minimal
This screen relies on the Balancer SDK to find the best price and execute the swap transaction in the Vault.
The next development will be the investment page, allowing to join/exit a liquidity pool. A mock-up will be made beforehand.

We completed our audit with Sherlock for the boosted pool leveraged vault mid-month and have just finished the fixes. The smart contract side is ready to go. We still need to do the frontend work to launch the pool, but we will likely wait to go live until Balancer migrates this pool which should be happening within the next few weeks.

While Balancer continues development of managed pools, RealEstate.Exchange are wrapping up the order book style DEX we are building to be able to launch. The aim to have 5 properties upon launch, right now they have signed MoUs of 2 and 2 more who are just about to sign.

On the legal side:

  • Clarified status of BRICK as a utility token under German and EU law

  • Obtained a legal opinion from a German law firm on the regulation of AMM and bulletin board systems on REX

  • Engaged with a Danish FSA to clarify the regulatory status of REX

  • Skytale — Wave 6

Skytale successfully delivered on their first grant in Wave 3 to add Balancer LP positions to their multichain tracking solution. This grant has been awarded to add functionality currently missing from the Balancer SDK, allowing future projects to easily implement a user Impermanent Loss Index and to Claim Liquitity Incentive.

This month, they have completed the following milestones and submitted for review:

  1. Integrate claim helper contracts for pools incentives, to be consistent with current front-end solution
  2. Integrate feeDistributor for veBal claims

The Quantstamp audit is in its final stages, and should be made public within the next two weeks or so. At that point, we will whitelist Aura-staked Balancer wstETH/WETH as collateral on Sturdy.

We have completed the project as per the grant proposal. We have been running on Goerli, for more than 2 months. After that, we added LP allowlisting, and deployed on Ethereum Mainnet in late December. However, the initial ManagedPool factory was deprecated, and we are currently waiting for a new one to be deployed. Next steps are to jump on a call with @Mkflow and others to iron out some details and timelines around deployment of the new factory contracts. Once those are ready we’ll deploy again and move our funds over. If you or anybody in the ecosystem is interested in building data-rich and complex asset management products that run in a decentralized and compliant way, reach out to oaksprout@valory.xyz.

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.

Our security audit by Certora has been completed and we have fixed the issues raised. Our WETH/USDC pool is live and working well at https://app.longswap.xyz, while we look to deploy more pools. We’re also looking to out our numerical analysis on how our TWAMM works with various parameters.

Financials

At time of writing BAL @ $7.04 USD

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About Balancer Grants

The BAL Grant program is one way BalancerDAO promotes the development of the Balancer Protocol and Ecosystem.

The BAL Grant program provides support and funding ($1K — $100K) to projects committed to supporting Balancer Protocol in achieving its mission to become the number one source for Decentralized exchange trades. This program is a good fit for individuals and groups that want to run a project that builds technology or resources on the Balancer Protocol.

Apply now!

If you are interested in supporting the development of the Balancer Ecosystem or want to build on top of the Balancer Protocol, this is your chance! Get started by filling in the Grants Application form. You can also check out our RFP page for inspiration!

For further questions about how the Grants SP works, check out the grants page, follow us on Twitter, or send an email to grants@balancer.community.

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