Balancer Grants: Wave 10 Monthly Update — November 2023
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 10 has given the program 35k BAL to be allocated towards grants for this current round!
As discussed in last months update, this quarter has seen a slow down with the intention to revamp and plan the Grant Program going into 2024. To accomplish this, the committee has been working on a review of the 64 grants to date to determine where value is coming from and how to focus the program. The data can be viewed here with the findings and report to be published in the next week.
With this planned slowdown and with the goal to revamp the grants program this wave, we will be focusing on:
- Continue to mentor and deliver with 12 existing grantees
The program currently has 12 live grantees building assorted integrations, novel use cases for Balancer pools, tooling, analytics and educational resources. These projects total ~$300k of committed funds yet to be paid for outstanding milestones. These can be reviewed on our Finalized and Live Grants Notion Page.
Deliverables: On-going support, monthly reports, coordination between Balancer entities.
- Fund new, interesting, high impact/low cost projects
With the 35k BAL requested, we will continue to accept grant proposal for new and interesting tech or tooling to grow the Balancer ecosystem. We aim to fund the following (non-exhaustive list):
- Tooling, calculators, educational resources or documentation improvements
- Interesting and promising new projects building on Balancer. This will not include yield aggregators, we are determining the requirement and use of a universal adaptor to reduce complexity and dev costs for these teams.
- Bounties for highly active community members providing dev support, incentivising integrations for analytics sites etc
- Other high impact, low cost projects for the protocol/ecosystem
Deliverables: Live Grant assessment sheet, monthly reports, weekly meetings
- Acceptance criteria and performance review of past grantees
With the program having run since 2021, we want to take this opportunity to look back on the grants awarded to date and assess what has created the most value to the Balancer Ecosystem. This review is to inform changes to the acceptance criteria we use to judge projects as well as direct our focus to valuable concepts for funding. This reporting will require a budget for analytics.
Deliverables: Revised grant assessment criteria, report detailing grant performance to date
- Aligning grants to Balancer’s latest roadmap
Coming into 2024, we want to create a unified roadmap for the Balancer ecosystem that the grants program can use as a guide for funding new projects. While we will stay open to new and novel ideas, it is important to have a known focus that we can communicate to teams for them to tailor applications towards.
Deliverables: Grant program outlook for 2024 presented in funding proposal at the end of Q4.
- Plan 2024 including a re-look at hackathons and IRL events.
Part of the grants revamp will look at funding hackathons and having a presence at IRL events through 2024. These events have the potential to bring in more teams and crowdsource novel use cases for the Balancer tech stack.
Deliverables: Budget allocation and schedule for impactful IRL events, assessment of known hackathons and criteria/goals for sponsorship.
New Live Grants
The total amount of applications of this wave has reached 33, with 5 progressing to the next stage and 2 grants approved for grants at a total of ~24k BAL (more info on latest grantee approval to be shared soon).
*Note this graph does not include calls for projects who do not submit a final application through the typeform.
Completed Grants this wave
- Xeonus & Zen Dragon — Wave 8
It took us a while but we finally made a big release completing the governance map / permissions / payload milestone.
- The interactive smart contract map: DeFilytica Tools
- The permissions map, visualizing currently active permissions, based on collab work with Trit: DeFilytica Tools
- Payload builder: DeFilytica Tools
Was a big endeavor. We are already using these tools internally a lot and think they will also benefit others when using / interacting and understanding Balancers smart contracts
Stale Grantees
We have unfortunately had two grantees have to discontinue their Balancer grants but we aim to spend these recovered funds on new projects and encourage these teams to re-visit the grants program in the future.
- GammaSwap — Wave 7
GammaSwap has made the difficult decision to discontinue their Balancer integration due to limited resources. The team is still building hard and the door will remain open for future possibilities with Balancer V3 launching in 2024.
- Yearn Finance — Wave 7
Yearn has decided to no pursue their yBAL implementation at this time. We will be working with the team to determine if there is an alternate path or seek to have current locked funds returned.
Grantee Updates — Building
- Bleu — Wave 10
Token yield APR is now implemented for initial feedback. The functionality is there with some bugs to work on: Balancer - Historical APR.
- Buidl Guidl — Wave 9
With Balancer V3 approaching, the BUIDL GUIDL has paused their development of scaffold-balancer-v2 to bring it to V3 once contracts and docs are in a more final form. This will pick back up to ensure projects building on V3 will have resources at their disposal.
- Dynamo — Wave 6
We are adding the finishing touches to our user interface and we are gearing up for our public launch.
We should be up and running in the following weeks.
- Ithil — Wave 5
We have brought the code of our core to the final stage, froze it and secured an audit which is ongoing. In terms of Balancer Strategy we are integrating the Chainlink quoter and implementing checks to ensure positions are balanced both at open and at close. This fixes the main vulnerability which blocked us from deploying for long time. Up for completion at year end and launch early next year!
Symmetric is finished building all controllers and have deployed and tested them on Celo. There is one outstanding issue (deploying managed pools) but work is finished and the controllers are ready for use
- Notional Finance — Wave 5
The strategies have completed audit with vault launch proposals up on the Notional forum. There is no set launch date but we are excited to see these nearing completion.
- Protofire — Wave 9
Audit
External audit has been assisted from our side, all asked info provided. Certora review is currently underway due for completion in December.
SC
Latest version of the launchpad SC has been deployed on testnet
Implemented roles for the separate features ability
Front-end and UI
WIP, UI part is done and will show the progress on the deployed test front-end next week for the feedback
Also we asked partners about the networks where the product should be deployed first, they requested two of them: Ethereum and Polygon (native, not zkEVM).
- RealEstate.Exchange — Wave 3
With difficult regulatory hurdles still to go and the long duration of this grant, we will be reassessing at the end of the year if funding is to continue.
- Xave Finance — Wave 7
In November, we made further advancements on the initiatives we started last month, focusing on permission-less deployments. A significant achievement was the launch of the Unified Pool UI, which displays FXPools from various networks along with essential information. Additionally, we addressed a bug identified in a white hat report. The fix was timely, as the permission-less deployments and the Unified UI proved crucial for the efficient redeployment of new pools.
Financials
At time of writing BAL @ $3.70 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.
We have a community powered Tools Hub and RFPs but we will always be open to new and unique ideas of how to improve and expand on Balancer’s flexible tech.
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.