Wave Overview
The Balancer Grants program was established in August 2021 after a community discussion before evolving into a Service Provider beginning Wave 5 which we have continued on to now complete Wave 11. This Wave ran from January through to the end of March 2023 with 64,671 BAL available for new grantees, 50k general, ~15k moonshot projects (approved via BIP-517/snapshot).
Looking back at Wave 11 and it’s goals
Following on from the quarter of reflections and subsequent report and recommendations, the grants program focused on:
- Mentor and deliver with existing grantees
The program begun the wave with 10 live grantees building assorted integrations, novel use cases for Balancer pools, tooling, analytics and educational resources. These can be reviewed on our Finalized and Live Grants Notion Page. Over the course of the quarter, this has come down to 3 live grants after successful deliveries and some stale grants being discontinued.
Deliverables: On-going support, monthly reports, coordination between Balancer entities.
2. Fund projects dedicated to increasing adoption of Balancer V3
With Balancer V3 launching in Q2 2024, grants set out to incentivize projects aiming to:
- Integrate Balancer V3.
- Create educational content, tooling and docs to lower barriers to entry for teams building on V3
- Create new use cases with Balancer custom pools
- Bounties for highly active community members providing dev support, incentivizing integrations for analytics sites etc
Of these, we funded one project building a novel use case for on Balancer (Opal Omni Pools) and one project creating core functionality on Balancer V3 (Protofire). There are two projects in discussion due for approval in Wave 12.
Deliverables: Live Grant assessment sheet, monthly reports, weekly meetings
3. Set aside funding for research and moonshot projects
We had a separate the funding budget to include a portion of grants that are interesting but may not have a fully formed adoption plan potentially including:
- Novel research topics or custom pools from teams that may not intend to turn it into a protocol
- Research optimization topics for existing infrastructure
We did not receive proposals that we thought fit this premise and as such, did not award grants with this funding.
Deliverables: Live Grant assessment sheet, monthly reports, weekly meetings
4. Funding categories
We have built a central hub for the tools that the community creates through grants or otherwise which lives at docs.balancer.fi/tools to make them more accessible for all.
We have added to our RFPs but we will always be open to new and unique ideas of how to improve and expand on Balancer’s flexible tech…
How has the Grants SP been doing the last months, and where do we see ourselves going? Let’s find out below!
Grant Achievements
After receiving 39 applications, we approved 2 grants across 2 teams for a total of 11,187 BAL.
Finalized Grants
- Dynamo — Wave 6
Dynamo have launched vaults and integrated into their front-end. With more products in the pipeline, this is a project to keep an eye on. We will be working with the team to see how they can tie into V3. Check them out at https://www.dynamofinance.io/
- Protofire veLaunchpad — Wave 9
Protofire has completed the launchpad and deployed on all networks. The simple FE is hosted at docs.balancer.fi/tools/core/admin-ve8020 as a core tool with the factories deployed on all chains where Balancer is deployed. This FE is an example for protocols to fork and create their own.
Contracts Github repo — GitHub - protofire/ve8020-launchpad
Audited by Certora — Certora's specification and verification of the ve8020-Launchpad
We have had the first ve8020 system launched through this tool by THX Network who have provided feedback to improve the application. There a few more teams already interested in using this tool to join ve governance, keep an eye out for these projects as they come live.
- Notional Finance — Wave 5
After boosted pools were discontinued, Notional Finance moved their focus to Arbitrum pools. They managed to launch their first two leveraged vaults on Arbitrum built on Balancer and Aura and have many more in store for 2024 on Arbitrum as well as on Ethereum and potentially other L2s
Grantee Updates — Building
The program is proud to present our grantees and their updates in alphabetic order:
- Buidl Guidl — Wave 9
The Buidl Guidl team has continued on their development of Scaffold-Balancer-V3 after pivoting from V2 this quarter. The scope was redefined to focus on V3 contracts creating an all-encompassing resource to take someone from little/no Balancer experience to creating a custom pool. This includes a Pool Contracts UI that allows one to troubleshoot deployed BalancerV3 custom Pools and two well-documented sample custom pools. The SOR and Data integration will follow as future milestones.
The team has delivered a preliminary deliverable showing a custom pool working on the locally deployable FE with more functionality to follow before submitting the accompanying docs. They are working closely with the Balancer team for feedback and guidance.
- Opal Finance — Wave 11
Opal Finance are building Omnipools on Balancer that allow for exposure across multiple Balancer pools for a single token. The allocation of liquidity is controlled by Opal governance through gauge votes defining the share of an Omnipool’s total liquidity that should be supplied to each underlying pool. The grant is covering Cantina audits to supplement those undertaken by Halborn Security. This grant was approved as it aligns well with Balancer as the #1 place for LSTs and implements an interesting mechanism. We’re excited to see this grow!
We have also approved a second grant this wave to a Protofire team working on core contracts of the V3 codebase. You’ll have to wait until this feature is live before we can share more details. Stay tuned!
Stale Grants
- Cron Finance — Wave 10
Cron Finance was funded in collaboration with MakerDAO to build out TWAMM functionality for Maker’s Smart Burn Engine to save significant gas costs. The development was completed by The Cron team, but Maker decided not to fund the audit and ultimately implement the technology. This was an unfortunate outcome as the project would have brought significant volume and revenue to Balancer. This grant was not announced at the time to wait for development to progress closer to launch.
- Ithil — Wave 5
The team is no longer following Ithil full time and do not have the capacity/resources to keep working on the grant. As such, we have agreed to discontinue this grant which will free up funds for future teams.
Due to shifting priorities, Balancer Grants, GoodDollar and Symmetric have agreed to finish this grant prior to completion of the original scope. The project had evolved to relying on Managed Pools which is no longer being actively supported by the Balancer Team.
- RealEstate.Exchange — Wave 3
As our longest running grant and managed pools no longer a priority for Balancer, we agreed to pay out the final milestone at 50% with RE.x to finish it off. The team has completed all technical requirements possible with the status of these contracts but final launch is dependent on unsure regulatory status and managed pool controllers which are not on Balancer’s current road map. The RE.x team is in contact with other managed pool builders and we hope these teams can work together to launch what they intend to make their projects a reality.
Grants Program Expenses
Next Wave…
Our funding proposal for Q2 2024 has been approved as a service provider to the Balancer DAO. With the recovery of funds from stale grants, funding was requested to top up the grants treasury to:
- 75,000 BAL for new grantees (6,809 BAL top up)
- 38,400 USDC for committee/support (29,400 USDC top up)
As always, we welcome comments and recommendations from the community on how to better develop the Balancer grants program.
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 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 11 has ended, but 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 questions about how the Grants SP works, check out the grants page, follow us on Twitter, or send an email to grants@balancer.community.