This wave we have 64,671 BAL available for new grantees, 50k general, 15k moonshot projects (approved via BIP-517/snapshot). Following on from the quarter of reflections and subsequent report and recommendations, the grants program is focused on:
- Continue to mentor and deliver with existing grantees
The program currently has 10 live grantees building assorted integrations, novel use cases for Balancer pools, tooling, analytics and educational resources. These projects total ~$290k 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.
2. Fund projects dedicated to increasing adoption of Balancer V3
With Balancer V3 launching in Q2 2024, grants will play a significant role in incentivising projects 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
Deliverables: Live Grant assessment sheet, monthly reports, weekly meetings
3. Set aside funding for research and moonshot projects
Separate the funding budget to include a portion of grants that are interesting but may not have a fully formed adoption plan. These are likely to be lower cost with no audit budget and could include:
- Novel research topics or custom pools from teams that may not intend to turn it into a protocol
- Research optimzation topics for existing infrastructure
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 have the grantees been building over January? Let’s find out below!
Grant Achievements
After receiving 14 applications, we have approved 2 grants across 2 teams for a total of 11,315 BAL.
New Grants this Wave
- 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 2 grants awarded in the last 2 months that are of a sensitive nature that we will announce officially soon. One being a grant approved to a team working to make Balancer a key part of a major DAOs infrastructure to reduce their fees and bring significant volume to Balance The second grant is 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!
Finalized Grants this Wave
- 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/
- 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
- RealEstate.Exchange — Wave 3
As our longest running grant and managed pools no longer a priority for Balancer, we have 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.
Grantee Updates — Building
The program is proud to present our grantees and their updates in alphabetic order:
- Buidl Guidl — Wave 9
With V3 fast approaching, the Buidl Guidl team have pivoted and are underway creating scaffold-balancer based on V3 contracts. We hope to see this delivered in the next couple months.
- Ithil — Wave 5
With January focus on their audit for their planned launch this quarter, Ithil will resume work on the Balancer integration and tackling the complexities of the protocol.
Symmetric is really getting to the homestretch and is very close to ready for audit, which is the final stage of our grant. We ran into some snags with managed pools, particularly join/exits, but think we have them solved. We are currently testing on Symmetric’s latest deployment on Telos Testnet, as we also ran into a couple issues particular to Celo. We anticipate bringing the project back to Celo for the benefit of GoodDollar’s usage after testing.
- Protofire veLaunchpad— Wave 9
Protofire has completed the launchpad and deployed on all networks. The FE is going through final review before being published on the Balancer docs site as a core tool. Here’s the full list:
Ethereum, Avalanche, Arbitrum,Base, Gnosis, Optimism, Polygon POS, Polygon zkEVM
- Xave Finance — Wave 7
-
We finished the FXMetaPool code and have a
bb-a-USDbased FXPool deployed using this functionality (see FXMetaPool - Xave Finance) -
When the Rate Manipulation vulnerability was announced, we decided to deprioritize releasing this functionality until the dust settled on the patch / fixes for it and the read only reentrancy fixes
-
Therefore we expect to release the final code-audited version of FXMetaPool before the end of Q1 (which is when we will deploy a new demo-able fxmetapool to FXMetaPool - Xave Finance for the grants committee)
Grants Program Expenses
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 10 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.