As we step into the second quarter, I’m pleased to report that the Maxis have successfully navigated a productive month. Our team has made substantial progress in our DevOps endeavors and has contributed significantly to the development of v3. This period also included a fruitful session at the OnSite event in Lisbon, where we engaged in meaningful strategic discussions and hosted a workshop focused on enhancing data quality across our ecosystem. The Maxis remain committed to their goals and are optimistic about the challenges and opportunities that the coming months will present.
In alignment with our Q2 funding proposal, we remain dedicated to advancing key strategic initiatives that propel Balancer’s growth. In this report, I will detail the current status of these initiatives, including a comprehensive overview of the budgeting for the development work undertaken…
Initiative 1: Transition to a professional DevOps organization with Automation
The Balancer Maxis were entrusted with maintaining more and more key infrastructure of the Balancer DAO. Therefore, the team had to undergo certain changes to accommodate for that responsibility. As a short summary, our current scope of operations work encompasses the following:
- Bi-weekly processing of fees, accounting for around $750k USDC each round
- Managing and maintaining partner incentive programs through our injector contracts
- Managing and distribution of chain grants, like the ARB STIP
- Managing and overseeing rate provider integrity, BAL distribution to all chains and distribution of veBAL fee shares through Chainlink and OpenZeppeling Automation
All these key components need a professional setup and 24/7 on call service and maintenance. Therefore, the Maxis requested an increased budget to further improve our infrastructure and code base. Additionally, we committed to provide breakdowns of how this budget will be spent. For this month, a breakdown of funds used will be provided at the end of this paragraph.
Let’s dive into the progress for outlined projects:
1. Fee Sweep Automation
- We are currently in the process of breaking down the logic of the fee sweeper repo into more easily digestible sub-components
- We have started to implement the fee recycling logic here
- We advised Mimic to optimize fee sweeps and reduce overall gas spent. We are currency monitoring their performance. A fees dashboard has been created to monitor and compare currently running and previous fee rounds against subgraph data
2. vlAURA voting
- We ran into challenges with broadcasting our votes as payloads to the snapshot sequencer. We are in close contact with snapshot devs to resolve a final issue with signatures. If that issue is not resolved in the upcoming vote round, we will evaluate different approaches to automate this process. The code base is checked in in this PR
3. OZ Defender Migration
- Balancer labs handed over the code base of OZ Defender in the legacy instance. This instance has to be migrated until June 2024
- We made great progress and fully migrated the code base to our org and created a repository and GitHub deployment pipeline
- In the last 2 voting rounds, we gradually migrated services and had fallback mechanisms in place. This worked great as we could first test L2 reward injectors and then switch over the key jobs like the BAL rewards bridging and fee injections.
- We are now fully operational on OZ Defender v2
- We decommissioned all legacy relayers and funded them in v2
- We also evaluated our current landscape of Chainlink automation jobs and migrated tasks to OZ Defender where it made sense
- Overall this initiative is well on track and we can conclude with code optimizations to reduce gas costs
4. Rewards Injector v2
- Work on this initiative has been kicked off. Main goal is to write tests for the Injector v2 code base
- Furthermore, we want to create a professional UI where partners can easily manage those injectors so we can hand over an easy to use product
5. Gauges and Core Pools
- We improved the code base to automatically detect core pools so we don’t need to maintain our core pools whitelist anymore. As of now, we will slowly introduce that new feature and maintain the core pools whitelist in parallel so we don’t have any service interruptions.
- The automatic removal flagging of stale gauges has been scoped and will be worked on as soon as the core pool functionality is fully operational
Other work conducted for data and automation
- Xeonus led a workshop at the onsite on how to streamline the data landscape for v2 and v3 and how to make sure we have good internal metrics to ensure data quality. The workshop was well received and resulted in great action items the teams are working on
- The Maxis are also advising the backend team on how to incorporate veBAL voting APRs so that those stats can be presented on the front-end in the near future.
Development budget breakdown - end of April 2024
| Project | Budget spent |
|---|---|
| OZ Defender v2 migration and optimizations incl. Chainlink | $3’717 |
| Automatic vlAURA voting | $2’160 |
| Rewards Injector v1 and v2 | $1’320 |
| Fee Recycling Code Base | $2’760 |
The total quarterly budget is $60k USDC of which until now $10’020 USDC have been spent on the key initiatives as described above (incl. misc work). The budget is therefore well within limits and Maxis will continue to use these funds as optimal as possible.
Initiatve 2: Grow Balancer v2 and Support v3 Design
Status on supporting v3 design
- For this initiative the Maxis are taking part in all key strategic meetings and are key stakeholders in the decision making processes. As we are deeply connected with all important partners, we are making sure that we are building the best possible product with v3. We can’t fully disclose all novel partnerships yet, but we are working together with strong partners to build new AMM designs as soon as v3 launches.
- For hook development, we took part in the hook hackathon at the Lisbon Onsite which provided great insights of the current implementation limitations. The smart contract team gathered lots of valuable feedback from that event to further improve the documentation and code base so that developing hooks on Balancer will be as smooth as possible for developers.
Status on v2 growth
- The Maxis are also working closely with the front-end and backend teams to improve the partner onboarding experience by designing a new pool creation and whitelisting process which should be much easier with the launch of Balancer v3
- Additionally, the injector v2 initiative will make it much easier for partners to set up and stream their rewards to Balancer gauges which will also further improve the overall partner experience
- We also focused our energy on making sure our v2 growth strategy aligns with chain expansion initiatives which is reflected in successfully voted in chain deployments on Linea, Monad and Mode
General contributions
Apart from the initiatives our main focus is currently set, we are constantly working on many other initiatives that have the goal to provide the best possible impact to the DAO. These initiatives included:
- Supporting the onboarding of Wonderland incl. advise on how to design and execute their proposal
- Advise potential partners like Myso on how to execute their proposal and payloads
- Advise and collaborate with Aura contributors on how to further optimize operations between the two teams, incl. reduction of gas costs
- Brainstorming new ideas for optimizing our tokenomics and core pool flywheel strategy
- Maintaining and improving reporting for the AURA and Balancer ecosystems through our DeFilytica dashboards
Conclusion
In terms of work packages, the Maxis are on track to deliver all promised features by the end of Q2. The request for an increased development budget is justified, as it will enable us to complete crucial infrastructure work before the launch of Balancer v3. Following this, our focus will shift toward supporting the deployment.
As we contribute to the design of v3, Maxis are committed to ensuring that it aligns well with market demands and lays a solid foundation for future DeFi products.
Overall, we are hopeful that our efforts will continue to positively impact the DAO, and we are thankful for the opportunity to contribute to this dynamic ecosystem.