Balancer Grants Wave 6 Update (Monthly Update #11)
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 December and the vote for grant wave 6 has given the program 95k BAL to be allocated towards grants for this current round!
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. Keep an eye out for our revamped RFP page launching soon for more ideas of how to add to the Balancer ecosystem and get a grant to do it!
Despite a drop off in applications this wave, the quality of projects coming through our Typeform have been some of the best we have seen, reinforcing the meme that a bear market is when dedicated builders stay and develop top products in readiness to capitalize when DeFi summer returns. We have 18 current live grantees building the next steps in DeFi innovation on top of Balancer, read on to see who has been recently approved, completed and where our existing grantees are up to.
New Live Grantees
The total amount of applications of this wave has reached 31, with 12 followed up and 6 projects approved for grants at a total of ~56,036 BAL.
New live grantees this month are:
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, their progress to date is:
- Added functionality to the Balancer SDK that allows impermanent loss calculation from a given timestamp
- Exposed Joins & Exits subgraph-based repository to SDK data
- Created a new price provider to retrieve historical prices from CoinGecko & integrated it into the Balancer SDK
Moving forward, their next goal will be further updating the Balancer SDK by integrating claim functionality.
Kassandra Finance has been approved for a grant to deploy their own managed pool on Polygon and develop their own interface for managed pools. They will me launching a Polygon social index as their first managed pool, and following this will build a fully functional UI to interact with, adjust parameters, and create managed pools. This grant will be just a starting point for Kassandra’s future, leveraging Balancer as a foundation to propel us both further into the cutting edge of Defi.
This month, progress achieved:
The UI/UX design for creating a new managed pool with Kassandra is 95% finished, there are a few small things to be fixed, and we’ll still be doing a few usability tests. The front-end team has reworked a few components of Kassandra to be multichain compatible. And the protocol and back-end team have been working on indexing price and TVL time-series for BPT of Balancer V2 for Kassandra interface on Polygon.
Grantee Updates — Building
The program is proud to present our grantees and their updates in alphabetic order:
a) We’ve launched our public alpha early in Nov with Optimism https://twitter.com/atlantis0x/status/1587590962381193217
having 14,000+ users playing around and completing quests within first 10 days!
b) We’re preparing for BAL clubhouse launch in Dec (will follow up with community activation proposal!), and we’re shipping the last milestone of our grant deliverable rn!
Boot Finance has begun diving into building their custom pool implementation on the Balancer v2 repository. Boot’s team has made good progress over the last month and are working on the core custom math.
Most of the work is in the underlying math library. They have started by adapting the existing stable swap code and needed to significantly rework the underlying library.
Boot has completed the contract side and now working on the UI/deployment phase. Once they have that up and running, they will take another look at the new functionality to check it in real-time and eliminate the issues that might come up. Barring unexpected problems, that should complete this phase.
- Cosme Fulanito
Cosme continues to champion the Balancer Spanish speaking community, translating articles, running Spanish Twitter account and providing assistance in Discord.
Cron Finance has successfully completed phase 1 of their TWAMM development Balancer grant which included highlights such as custom pool integration, gas optimizations, attack vector analysis, payment for order flow system, and oracles. In their second phase they are developing an automatic MEV reinvestment mechanism, in-depth numerical analysis & testing, and finally completing a security audit by SpearbitDAO leading to launching on Goerli Testnet followed by the Guarded Mainnet Launch.
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 October here.
- Dynamo’s designer is right now creating the design of the landing page. Currently their first draft us underway and the results are expected in the upcoming weeks.
- @rohmanuseth and @GruttePier are busy with the setup of the legal entity to smoothen our way to become a legally compliant company.
- They start bizdev discussions with several protocols starting from next week to gather more strong partnerships and find angel investors.
- Our lead smart contract engineer (Ben) has finished the governance part of the vault infrastructure and drew several sequence diagrams
- Furthermore, they finished the setup of a fully functional Balancer copy at their side that will simplify the development of our vault smart contracts.
- Dynamo has bootstrapped their docs (Docusaurus app) and started to fill it with some of the content from the white paper (including Ben’s sequence diagrams). They have deployed the docs to GitHub pages and you can have an initial look yourself (content is still missing though): https://dynamofinance.github.io
- We furthermore deepened our plans to interact with the Balancer ecosystem by planning to create three base pools instead of only one.
- They’re in discussion with potential auditing firms for the upcoming ERC-4626 vault and have one firm that has a strong background in Vyper (tbd).
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As we want our Balancer + Aura strategy to be one of the first to be features on Ithil, we are reworking the core architecture of Ithil to support multitoken LPing too. Users will be able to join a Balancer pool using a single or a multiple number of tokens. We should be able to wrap this effort up before Christmas. Aside from the enriched tests, we’re also in talks with Certora to determine whether they can assist us with improved security.
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We’re upgrading the strategy with a more efficient harvesting mechanism. It’s similar to what Yearn did with CowSwap and will significantly improve performance.
Due to the above points the timeline will be slightly stretched compared to the grant proposal, likely by a few months. Not to worry: the final outcome is shaping up to be better than planned for.
Symmetric and GoodDollar have made some key decisions on contracts and underlying features to be used in the multi-asset bonding curve to be built on top of Balancer tech. Specifically, a decision has been made after research and consultation with Griff from Giveth and Ahmad from Balancer to use Managed Pools contracts and develop a Controller with the with the following features utilized:
- Circuit Breakers: This protects the reserve from extreme fluctuations in price and token specific risk
- Add/remove tokens: This helps to address token specific risk in conjunction with circuit breakers while allowing long term flexibility.
- Change Weights: This allows for long term flexibility for the reserve
The next step will be to deploy the managed pools contracts, which will be completed by the end of November. Additionally, the Symmetric team is still researching other projects who have developed similar pools on top of Balancer tech, specifically IndexCoop, who may be able to provide some indirect or direct assistance with a controller.
Multifarm was awarded a grant from Balancer to build an in-depth custom analytics dashboard in order for the Balancer community to be able to transparently visualize all of the stats and activities around veBAL. Users will be able to see the bribes, pool emissions & trading fees and much more in detail and take better informed decisions around their investments (some teasers can be seen here). Major dev work has been completed and we are completing final reviews prior to launch.
Notional Finance was announced as the final grant approved for Wave 5 with leveraged vaults to offer code collateralized lending. Leveraged vaults allow users to borrow cash at a fixed rate from Notional and deposit it into a whitelisted smart contract executing a specific yield strategy.
The first LP strategy using the ETH/wstETH pool went live Nov 22nd with over 2,300 ETH of the 2,500 ETH capacity filled within a couple days of launching. For more info on how to take advantage of this leveraged vault read on here. Keep an eye out for their next strategy using Balancer/Aura Boosted Stablecoin LP.
The team is screening two new smart contract devs with the repo linked to last month (balancer-v2-monorepo/pkg/pool-weighted/contracts/managed at master · balancer-labs/balancer-v2-monorepo · GitHub), and will decide on one of them most likely this week. Then we will start working on a suggestion for a controller function, which is what is missing and hence what we will have to build/customize ourselves. This is done together with the Jeff and the rest of the Balancer team.
The team has made the significant step to testnet (Introducing the Autonomous Fund) on Goerli. The repo is also open-source now, see blog article. The team will spend the next week or so debugging on testnet. Once we’re happy we will do a further internal audit and then start preparations for a mainnet launch with training wheels.
Verified has been working with Balancer to develop custom pools for issuing and trading regulation compliant security tokens. Verified has delivered complete implementation of two new pools on Balancer, and also the subgraph and SOR code to integrate them. They are now working with the support from the integrations team to finalize their code base. Verified is awaiting review of the SOR and integration of the primary and secondary issue pools. These pools that allow issuing of new tokenized securities and secondary trading of already issued tokenized securities are fully implemented and enable KYC’ed investors in these pools to receive regulation compliant securities and assets that underlie the tokens.
- Xeonus
In the last month I have been focusing on significantly reducing data fetching times as well as implementing a completely overhauled front-end. It is close to beta testing and will be released soon. You can follow my progress on my Github (GitHub - Xeonus/balancer-analytics: Balancer V2 analytics)
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 team is code complete pending a security audit and is being proposed to go through the Balancer Certora Security Accelerator.
Finalized Grants
Overnight has launched the Overnight pulse’ on Beethoven on OP, USDC/DAI stable pool boosted by USD+/DAI+ money market products by Overnight. Within 10 days since launch, the pool has reached 1.5M USD TVL and yields have remained well above 15% APR despite such a high growth as rewards yield is supported by strong yields from USD+/DAI+
Financials
At time of writing BAL @ $6.13 USD
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! (keep an eye out for a revamped page with more ideas launching soon)
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.