Balancer Maxis August 2023 Update

Service Providers Balancer Maxis
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Balancer Maxis August 2023 Update

Good news, or bad news?

Bad news: we thought migrations were behind us!

After the vulnerability disclosed and boosted pools shutting down indefinitely, another great effort to migrate incentives to new gauges. Another big step back - no doubt - but we are glad the issue was reported in time for many users to move their funds safely.

Maxis are playing key roles leading the war room, and we keep hearing good things about how Balancer team handled the situation well. So far, we experienced very few complaints of funds loss after the exploits on Aug 26th.

We persevere!

Good news: we had another couple of successful deployments on Avalanche and Base. Balancer reached up to ~$15,5M in August on these two chains, and even after the vulnerability report, we continue to see organic growth.

Source: defillama.com

Being on Base since d-0 paid off, seeing some action from memecoins like GOLD and BALD (and high fees), but getting aggregator to work their routes through Balancer was a major pain point. Lesson learned: we need to improve the process of whitelisting pools and also working on solvers that can see routes through Balancer pools! These are key elements for competitiveness. Arguably, we shouldn’t have launched without it, but it looks like we never would’ve if we were to wait for big names like 1inch and Dexscreener to show us their love.

Maxis are still following zkEVM up close. There have been several users reporting swap and withdrawal issues with Discord community support, which have been forwarded to tech teams. Polygon also announced a fix for September (Dragonfruit). Incentives on zkEVM continue as normal.

Our vision for L2s is to secure strong positions and enable organic builders in such networks. The bigger presence Balancer has on a particular L2 the more likely organic usage develops. Following this line of thought, we should determine which L2s we believe are most likely to have the potential for organic usage and where Balancer can have a path towards relevancy.

Here are the bullet point updates for August. For reference, please review [BIP-347] which funded the Balancer Maxis for Q3/2023.

  • Multisig Management

    • Two protocol fee distributions took place for a total of $489k (voting incentives, Treasury, veBAL). Fees and core pool incentives (BIP-19) detailed stats here.
    • Automation and operation of governance and the multisigs continues - see the Maxi GitHub for more info.
    • [BIP-397] Authorize Mimic Smart Vault on Gnosis Chain
    • [BIP-408] Change Passive Fee Distribution (from bb-a-USD to USDC)

  • Governance

  • User/Project Support

    • @Gleb and @Cosme active on community support (Discord) it’s been a very busy couple of weeks - monthly meetings with frontend team and BLabs every Monday.
    • Tokens and pool whitelisting
    • Telegram chats always busy

  • Community

    • “Balancer “Anti Scam Initiative” - @Dubstard saw a very active month, shutting down opportunistic scammers on the week of the report.
    • “The Balancer Report” weekly newsletter by @Gleb and @Cosme
    • Plans continue for the contributor’s offisote in Milan in October.
      • TimBalabuch working on sticker pack designs for ETH Milan

  • DAO Dev Work

    • Provided feedback for integration testing of new API endpoints that will be used by partners and the FE team in the future
    • Consulted with data team to fix subgraph data and metrics after the boosted pool exploit
    • Re-enabled killed gauges for defilytica.tools so people can easily switch votes from killed gauges in one tx on DeFilytica Tools
    • Work on overall fee stats commenced for Balancer analytics
    • A complete governance map showing all smart contract relationships is being worked on

  • Record Keeping

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