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!
This quarter will see a slow down with the intention to revamp and plan the Grant Program going into 2024. With this planned slowdown and with the goal to revamp the grants program, 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 20 including 2 from the end of Wave 9, with 4 progressing to the next stage and 1 grants approved for grants at a total of ~4,242 BAL.
Grantee Updates — Building
- Bleu — Wave 10
— The Pool Simulator project is complete! It now features a variety of pool types from Gyroscope and Xave Finance, along with the previously included stable pools. Explore this new tool here: https://balancer-tools.bleu.fi/poolsimulator
— Our original project, creating visualizations for historic pool APYs based on veBAL emissions and Swap fees, has reached completion thanks to the initial grant. Following a grant extension, we’ve expanded our project to incorporate token yield APY and token Rewards APY. The latest addition, token yield, is now available in the app’s current version. Check it out here: Balancer - Historical APR
- Buidl Guidl — Wave 9
The BUIDL GUIDL has begun the work of exporting previous scaffold-balancer work to ScaffoldETH V2. The bulk of the development work will be carried out over the next two months. Within November, we aim to have custom smart contracts for the custom pools (2 or 3 types) roughly implemented into the front end, alongside tutorial walkthrough in the form of markdown drafts. The intent is to collect feedback from the Balance community with these draft deliverables, that will help hone the final product for EOY. The SOR work will be the focus alongside the Subgraph work for December likely.
- Dynamo — Wave 6
Our ERC-4626 vault has been audited and is ready for deployment. We’re in the final stages of development regarding the FE (hardhat putting up a fight). With boosted pools out of the picture we’re pivoting to a different pool mechanic in cooperation with Balancer, more on this later.
- GammaSwap — Wave 7
“We underwent an implementations audit in March to adapt the Balancer weighted pools (80/20) to our factory contracts. Subsequently, we initiated a trading competition on testnet, which led to a realization that some refinements were needed in our approach.
After the competition, we refactored our contracts to optimize for the most common use cases, necessitating the execution of additional mathematical calculations on-chain. We have successfully resolved and implemented this for a 50/50 pool in our current contracts but yet to do so for Balancer.”
With this information we’re discussing how to remove blockers to complete this grant and bring GammaSwap to Balancer.
- Ithil — Wave 5
We started to tidy up our contracts, which are now too big to be deployed because of the large quoter, and inserting checks to prevent frontrun attacks on the quoter side (we found one by developing). Once this is done we can deploy
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 audit scheduled for the end of November has been delayed due to an employee moving on who was responsible for this integration. The team is getting up to speed with the code to ensure there can be proper engagement with the auditors and is expecting a 3 week delay. Expected launches are early-mid December for three Balancer vaults on Arbitrum.
- Protofire — Wave 9
What’s done in October:
Documentation guide
We created deployment scripts for all smart contracts, ve-system documentation with overview and deployment instructions, also VotingEscrow extension documentation. Created documentation with subgraph bootstrapping and query examples.
veToken page developed
Created design layouts for veToken page and deployed it test environment for the review and feedback from Balancer team.
SDK created
Developed React and Typescript-compatible integration of veToken functionality and created SDK. subgraph-queries
November plans:
Launchpad
Create and test functionality of the ve-pool creation on the testnet and launch it on the mainnet.
Tests & Audit
Conduct unit tests of the smart-contracts and User Acceptance Tests. Smart contract audits by Protofire team also running in parallel.
Atomica protection integration
- RealEstate.Exchange — Wave 3
We are still working towards the launch in the US in Q4 and primarily concentrated on getting the DID scheme to work with Polygon and Fractal.
- Yearn Finance — Wave 7
All grant work is complete and we are in discussion with the Yearn team to ensure their yBAL is officially launched at an optimum time for success. Watch this space!
- Xave Finance — Wave 7
New Feature Rollout: Autonomous FXPool Creation
This month, responding to partner feedback, we’ve introduced a new feature that allows for the independent creation of FXPools. This development streamlines the process, removing the necessity for our direct intervention during that process.
The setup of an FXPool involves more intricate steps compared to standard pools. It requires the integration of Chainlink oracle addresses for both base and quote tokens, along with the accurate determination of specific pool parameters like ALPHA, BETA, etc. An incorrect configuration renders the pool non-operational.
Our latest enhancement simplifies FXPool deployment, enabling users to provide liquidity seamlessly in a single step (excluding token approval). This efficiency is particularly beneficial for stablecoin issuers already coordinating with us, who are eager to initiate their pool deployment and liquidity provision, whether for trial phases or actual production use.
- 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
Financials
At time of writing BAL @ $3.30 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.