Balancer Grants May 2023 Update

Service Providers Grants
1

Apologies for the delayed posting here, report was posted to Medium 6/6.

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 June and the vote for grant wave 8 has given the program 55,719 k BAL to be allocated towards grants for this current round!

New Live Grantees

The total amount of applications of this wave has reached 61 including 9 from the end of Wave 7, with 19 progressing to the next stage and 7 projects approved for grants at a total of ~11,185 BAL. We will be announcing these individually soon, closer to the release of their deliverables that we’re very excited about!

Baller OGs Xeonus and Zen Dragon are returning to further build out Balancer Tools. This grant will focus on enhancing user experience, streamlining business development, and facilitating governance participation within the Balancer ecosystem. We are excited to support these initiatives, which will further strengthen the accessibility and functionality of Balancer Tools. More details of their grant specifics are here.

  • Bleu

bleu is a web3 technology and user experience collaborator for companies and DAOs. With connection to the Balancer ecosystem though Fabio (BLabs) they have provided multiple improvement projects across tooling, visualisations and dapps through grants. So far their contributions have included:

  • Dubstard

Dubstard has been heading up an anti-scam initiative targeting fake Balancer sites, discord phishing attempts and other avenues scammers use to try to steal user funds and information. Dubstard’s contributions keeping Balancer users safe have been invaluable — check out May’s monthly report and the #scam-reports channel in the Balancer discord here.

  • TaliAI

Tali is an intelligent, AI-driven Discord bot designed to answer developer related questions. Tali is trained on Balancer’s developer docs, Medium articles, and codebase. It also has the ability to make web-requests. The bot has been through a guarded private round of testing and is now live for its next phase of testing in the public discord channel #ask-tali-support-beta-channel. We welcome all questions through this trial to help train the AI as answers cannot be 100% relied on at this time but it’s promising technology that we are very excited about.

  • 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 support and translations until the end of this quarter.

Finalized Grants this Wave

Kassandra Finance has successfully deploy their own managed pool on Polygon and developed their own interface for managed pools. This is now live, check it out at https://www.kassandra.finance/

During this month of April, the project was finalised. The last step was to develop the investment page that allows joining the Balancer liquidity pools.

The site is deployed at this address: https://balancer-ui.org

The source code is here: GitHub - nma100/balancer-minimal-ui

Many thanks to the Balancer DAO for supporting this project.

Grantee Updates — Building

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

  • A Customswap factory contract and its supporting library are on Goerly.
  • We have successfully instantiated a custom swap pool, created a test token (XCR), set up supporting rate provider contracts, seeded the pool, and performed test swaps.
  • We also successfully tested the swapping behavior with various amplification parameter settings using scripts.

The above completes phase two of the work.

Nevertheless, we are also working on a front end because it significantly improves testing and usability. The following functionality has been completed.

  • pool creation screen
  • swapping screen

The following remains to be done:

  • pool seeding / provisioning
  • swap parameters updates

We were able to complete the first steps towards our first audit last month. We’ve gotten in touch with a well respected senior security engineer and we will soon conduct a first smart-contract audit in cooperation with said engineer. Besides that, we’re working on our frontend and have achieved some early success on the BizDev front.

The audit has been completed and can be viewed here: DocSend with critical bugs now closed out.

Do to resource constraints from GammaSwap’s lean team, this grant will be reduced in scope to the second milestone which is integrating Balancer live on Mainnet.

The team is continuing work on the frontend. They also published an orderbook model dex that will be used to settle swaps due to the fragmented liquidity on Arbitrum.

The Symmetric team had completed work on two controllers to manage GoodDollar’s (and others) reserves. There are some last minute updates to the GUI and internal testing to be done before audit as this will satisfy phase 2 of the grant.

Github repo — GitHub - centfinance/Balancer.Controller: A controller for Balancer with a bonding curve implementation

With priorities on Notional V3, this grant work is on hold. The team remains ready on the smart contract side, but requires some more work on the frontend to get that ready for completion. Once Notional V3 is launched, the grant work will continue.

We’ve completed the integration with our KYC provider, which can be found here: RealEstate.Exchange. Currently, working on allowing only whitelisted wallets to create and interact with pools on RealEstate.Exchange. In addition we also want to be able to sync up whitelisted wallets with others so we can integrate for example with security token issuance platforms, so if a wallet is whitelisted with them, then they can also trade on our platform (RE.X)

Most items are basically done, except for some maintainence that I will keep doing:

Permissions: Active Permissions | Balancer
Contracts: Arbitrum Deployment Addresses | Balancer
Governance: Overview | Balancer

A result of doing all this (and maxi documentation) was the addressbook: GitHub - BalancerMaxis/bal_addresses: An auto generating address book of the addresses known and used by the Maxis and in governance.

We excluded the half of Unit 2 (Timelock Authorizer) for $7500

I also volunteered to reduce Unit 3 (the maxi bounty) as there were concerns about overlap and I don’t have volumes of independent docs written about the maxi stuff.

The Auto updating contracts list and bal_addresses were not part of the initial scope of work, but fell easily out of what was being done and were needed.

For more info see Tritium’s notion.

Main update here is that we’ve been gathering depositors to participate in the launch of the first production SMP. We have several already but if there are people from the Balancer ecosystem who want exposure to this crypto fear and greed strategy, we’d love to hear from them. We’re gearing up for that launch next month.

  • BAL grant (part 1 and 2) will be used this week to make initial yBAL LP
  • yBAL audit results came back, only minor fixes needed and expected to complete this week
  • internal security review process still needed for Zap contract (est ~1 week)
  • UI is complete, but waiting on zap deployment to be fully tested in prod (est. ready by early next week)

FXMetapool
We’re progressing through testing on public testnet and mainnet forks. Testing instructions can be found here → FXMetaPool - Xave Finance.
We are scheduling an imminent contract audit with an external auditor.

Other Updates:
Enhanced XSGD rewards for the XSGD-USDC pool on Polygon have been running since April. Xave has published a detailed overview on our Medium, here → Introducing — Enhanced XSGD Rewards | by Xave Finance | Xave Finance | May, 2023 | Medium

Financials

At time of writing BAL @ $5.30 USD

700×687 116 KB

696×415 15.2 KB

2 Likes