Balancer Grants SP is 2 months into Wave 13! This month has seen our builders keep building and a hackathon kicked off, but our treasury has continued to take a hit with the decreasing BAL price. We have always maintained a high standard for applications to be approved and this has become more so while we continue through the bear. We continue to manage our live grantees, assist with connecting with resources when they can be of assistance and exploring funding opportunities to grow the Balancer ecosystem.
Read on to see what we and our grantees have been up to.
Grant Achievements
After receiving 44 official applications this wave, we have approved 2 grants for a total of 20,000 BAL and launched a DAO collaborated hackathon for building hooks on Balancer v3.
Balancer v3 Hookathon
One of the most exciting initiatives we have currently funded by Balancer Grants is a virtual Hookathon now live here on DoraHack.io. The Hookathon aims to incentivize exploring and developing hooks on Balancer v3 to boost a community of DeFi developers and DevRel Experts to thrive in a new flexible design space. It is a unique opportunity to experiment with the Balancer v3 hook infrastructure, collaborate with Balancer’s core developer team, build new and innovative liquidity features around existing AMMs, and win a share of a $17k prize pool.
As part of this, we have created a hooks directory which will be a community curated home for all hook contracts, ideas and a place for devs to submit their own creations.
Finalized Grants
- Eridani — Dynamic Fee Research | Wave 12
This month, the team submitted their finding for research conducted on maximizing revenue captured by Balancer pools from CEX/DEX arbitrage with dynamic fee functions. We analyzed different dynamic fee functions with volatility, volume and gas fee based inputs for 8 Balancer pools to try maximize their revenue. Our approach was to study different fee functions to find functions that increase revenue from CEX/DEX arbitrages while maintaining or decreasing the average fee level in the pools. We find that dynamic fee functions could both increase revenue and decrease average fees for 4 out of the 8 studied pools, while 2 of the pools could increase revenue at the cost of increasing average fees.
For example, adopting volume based dynamic fees could increase revenue of WBTC-WETH pool by up to 40% while decreasing the average fee.
There does not seem to be an universal solution as different pools have different optimal parameters. However, volume-based fee functions show the most promising results across all pools. In summary, our findings suggest that certain pools’ revenue could be significantly increased while decreasing average pool fees by adopting dynamic fee functions. Pools with high arbitrage volume have the most to gain from these dynamic fees.
Huge thanks to @BalancerGrants for funding this study. You can read the full report here.
Grantee Updates — Building
The program is proud to present our grantees and their updates in alphabetic order:
- Opal Finance | Wave 11
Mostly UI /UX improvements, including airdrop checker, new landing page, merging of commands to save gas fees and improve the on chain governance process, and upgrades of our Hypernative monitoring.
On partnerships, we strengthen our relationship with Usual, and canvassed new power users who already started depositing 100’s k$ in the Omnipools. Our focus is to get TVL back to launch levels.
Re: milestone of our grant, the main work going on is research and development to launch the first ever multichain Omnipool, however the development was paused to review Balancer v3 code base and identify areas for improvement of our current usage of the various AMMs.
Since the grant is dedicated to audit funding, we recently established contact with a new auditing tool that could suit our needs for the contract review of the multichain Omnipool.
- QuantAMM — Protocol | Wave 12
On the protocol, first version of the protocol on Balancer V3 is complete. Team is expanding the test framework before submitting MS1. Work on MS2 is 50% of the way there. API integration for front end is also ongoing. Audit is being organised with Cyfrin and Code4rena for mid to late October.
- QuantAMM — Pool Simulator | Wave 13
Over the past year, QuantAMM has developed a Python-based AMM simulator with a TypeScript React/Redux front end. This simulator has advanced GPU-friendly G3M core functionality, not possible before a number of QuantAMM research breakthroughs, as well as specific functionality related to dynamic weight pools such as QuantAMM BTFs.
This grant is for the QuantAMM team to build an extension to their pool simulator to allow for functionality that will mean a wide range of Balancer v3 pools can utilize the simulator. This includes dynamic fee modeling, retail fee modeling, CowAMM and other known Balancer pool types. A range of functionality to be added has been proposed that could also enhance live pool analysis given the possibility of importing live pools to the analysis set. The code will be open sourced for additional teams that build on v3 to add their variations and additional future features if needed.
To kick this off, the team has implemented forward passes of pools with externally-provided time-varying fees.
- Xave Finance — Porting FX pools v3 | Wave 13
We’re pleased to report significant progress on our project to upgrade our codebase to support Balancer V3. Here are the key highlights:
- Development Progress: we’re in the final stages of our development work. The majority of the codebase upgrades have been completed, and we’re now focusing on refining and optimizing the implementation.
- Invaluable Support: We want to emphasize the tremendous support we’ve received from the Balancer Dev team throughout this process. Their guidance and support have been instrumental this upgrade.
- Next Steps: With the development work nearing completion, we’re preparing to enter the audit phase. This crucial step will ensure the security and reliability of our upgraded codebase.
We’re excited about the enhanced capabilities that Balancer V3 will bring to our project and look forward to sharing the final results with the community soon.
Yet to be announced:
In addition to these, we have 1 grantee working on adding new functionality to the V3 codebase that will be shared once complete. You’ll have to wait until this feature is live before we can share more details. Stay tuned!
We keep building!
Grants Program Expenses
The Grants treasury has taken a significant hit due to negative price action. We continue to monitor this and ensure we keep sufficient funds to pay out our committments. The grants SP contributors have been offering their time pro bono as part of other DAO roles and the grants lead comp reduced further to ensure impact to the DAO treasury is minimized.
About Balancer Grants
The BAL Grant program is one way Balancer DAO 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.
We have a community powered Tools Hub, Hook directory and RFPs but we will always be open to new and unique ideas of how to improve and expand on Balancer’s flexible tech.
Wave 13 Grants continues. 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! We also have an application guide for what we’re looking for in a grant submission here.
For further information about how the Grants SP works, check out the grants page, follow us on X, or send an email to grants@balancer.community.