For full visibility to the community the Grants team will be sharing our monthly updates within the forum and continue to do so on our medium page. This post will highlight the month of July and one will follow shortly after to summarize the month of August. From here forward we will be up to date on both the forum and medium channels. See the full July update on medium here. We also would like to invite and encourage the community to provide feedback regarding the grants team and our grantees on this forum. Also, feel free to suggest potential grantees to apply for our program.
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.
The total amount of applications in the first month of this wave has reached 25, 3 projects of which have been approved for grants.
The only grantee announced for the month was mkflow, see more details below, while the other 2 are / were in the final discussions regarding deliverables and milestones.
Approved Grants:
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. 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.
Grantee Updates - Building:
Over the time Atlantis has vastly improved our performance & updated the servers across 3 continents. The BAL clubhouse and integration is ready and their team will soon update the NPCs to custom ones for in-game access! On top of this, Atlantis has added Snapshot NPC, so users could vote inside of the clubhouse itself making governance a social event. Current development is integrating all balancer trade UI updates into the clubhouse as the existing interface is from pre-veBAL implementation.
Cron Finance is developing TWAMM on top of Balancer via custom pools. They successfully prototyped TWAMM specific virtual order features and have started the gas optimization work. For the 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: June 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 will be wrapping up work as planned and have weighted pool creation as part of our SDK in the coming weeks.
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 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 July ‘22:
- Our applications integration and user interface for creating pools (using our custom pools), investing in them and trading is complete. UI for investing and trading is somewhat different from the current balancer UI.
- Devs are working through issues for running batch swaps and will link in with Balancer devs for SOR work.
- We have the first set of issues coming up in end August, so we will be handing over the pool implementations for a final review this week before we deploy them on the mainnet
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. This grant is planned to span over 3 to 4 months and is broken into four phases. 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 third and four phases will include the development of a web app and the ultimate launch.
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:
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 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
