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 and 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! Despite a drop off in applications this wave, we have had a few exciting projects come through that we have had the opportunity to award grant funding to.
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.
Read on to see who has been recently approved and where our existing grantees are up to. Feel free to check out the original post, and many more on our medium page as well.
New Live Grantees
The total amount of applications of this wave has reached 20, with 9 followed up and 5 projects approved for grants at a total of ~54,319 BAL.
New live grantees this month are:
Overnight Finance has a history with Balancer from assisting in the initial implementation of linear and boosted pools. They have since launched their USD+ token for high quality yield to be generated through stable token assets such as USDC and DAI. They proposed to launch a boosted pool of their own on Balancer using these assets and determined to align best with the Optimism ecosystem in terms of goals and the bootstrapping opportunity. This month alone Overnight has launched their pool and is finalizing their initial protocol owned liquidity seed to kickstart the yield and incentive flywheel to get their boosted pool implementation off the ground.
The team from Dynamo is using Balancer V2 architecture to build a yield aggregator for decentralised stablecoins and other assets such as Ethereum staking derivatives by aggregating lending markets such as Aave and Compound. Through this grant, Balancer aims for the end result to be a new boosted pool use case of ERC4626 bringing more liquidity and fees to the protocol and set a precedent for more people to build.
Multi-asset Bond Curves — GoodDollar & Symmetric
This grant is to fund the R&D for a potential new use case for Boosted Pools in the Regenerative Finance (ReFi) space and we’ll be announcing in the coming weeks. The aim is to create a tool which can be used by many projects to take advantage of Boosted Pools creating a sustainable ReFi ecosystem and bring TVL from projects using the solution.
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.
Grantee Updates — Building
The program is proud to present our grantees and their updates in alphabetic order:
Atlantis World is launching early Nov! Balancer community members will be able to play around the world, enjoy social activities including community meetups and audio/video chats, as well as in-game onboarding quests! Stay tuned for more updates, and Balancer clubhouse launch party in December!
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.
The core difference in Boot’s solution is that they are working with two curves instead of one. In addition to tracking both curves’ parameters, we need to retrofit our algorithm into the Balancer way for calculating fees and handling changes in amplification factor(s) and token rates. There are no blockers outside of the stitching together of the mathematic functions, which currently is estimated to take two to three additional weeks.
- Cosme Fulanito
Update from Cosme — “The Spanish-speaking community of Balancer continues on the same path and with the same ideals. Our goal is to include all the people who want to know about Balancer and don’t know English. To achieve this, we translate the content and relevant Twitter posts daily. This month we also did trivia with prizes for the winners and published educational content. Additionally, we provide Discord support on our Spanish channel whenever required. I thank the team for supporting this initiative.”
Ithil is nearing completion on their frontend on a public mainnet fork instance, here is the current repo v1-core/BalancerStrategy.sol at master · Ithil-protocol/v1-core · GitHub
They have finalised the code, completed the frontend integration for the strategy and started the first tests with the most common pools (WETH-DAI and WETH-WBTC)
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 with the dashboard going through it’s final review and updates before 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 innovation? All the assets in the smart contract act as liquidatable collateral for their debt, allowing users to get highly leveraged exposure to the strategy.
The audit finished up about 10 days ago and the team has been reviewing flagged issues since then. The majority of the issues have been responded to and are in final review of the proposed fixes.
Work is continuing on the UI with the intention to launch the leveraged vaults in Beta next week
Community: We have engaged with wider audiences and grown our channels, getting as many people as possible excited about real estate on the blockchain
Sales: We have now engaged with 4 clients/properties that are ready to list with us upon launch. Last time we spoke I believe we had just 1, so things are definitely looking up.
Tech: To service these first clients while managed pools get built out, we are working on a simple order book / bulletin board where sell/buy bids are recorded and accepted on-chain. This is not the version we want to rely on when we scale, but it will get us going. We are expecting to implement our exchange built on managed pool infrastructure as our final product when the green light is given by the development team.
This month we completed our integration tests and audits, as planned. So the code and tests are all in place. We also aimed to be running on a testnet but are blocked on the release of the Managed Pools contracts. As soon as they’re in place we’ll deploy and begin our testnet phase.
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 on a deadline to launch the first issue in November, with the support from the integrations team. 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
I have completed the migration to the balancer-v2 subgraph and integrated CoinGecko token price data. These changes are live in the current build at info.balancer.xeonus.io and should be in line with data presented through the balancer front-end. Currently, I am building a complete redesign of the analytics site with Material UI. 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.
Stale Grantees
We have unfortunately had to discontinue a couple grants discussed below however BAL from outstanding milestones will be put to use funding new projects.
- Tracer DAO / Mycelium (Grants 1&2)
After some delays to this grant with TracerDAO’s transition to Mycelium and focus being shifted to parallel projects, the committee and Mycelium have decided to discontinue this grant.
Due to increasing priority for these updates to be added to the SDK and Javier’s availability, we have agreed to discontinue this grant with the Balancer team to finish off from where Javier got to. The work done on previous milestones was worthwhile and we thank Javier for his contributions!
Financials
At time of writing BAL @ $6.78 USD
