Summary
The successful launch of Balancer v3 marked a pivotal moment for the Maxis and the ecosystem as a whole. We played a crucial role in partner management, on-chain operations and bootstrapping core liquidity for our Ethereum and Gnosis launch. Together with other achievements like the completion of major milestones we set for ourselves in Q4, we can now fully commit to further optimize our processes (incl. personnel cost) and focus on the full activation of the gauge system and fee processing for Balancer v3
Mid Funding Review of the Maxis Deliverables
Given we are now midway through the current funding round, it’s time to evaluate our performance and if we hit our objectives. I will summarize our performance based on the objectives outlined in our 3 initiatives within our funding proposal.
Initiative 1: Scale Balancer’s On-Chain DevOps Hub
- We guaranteed operations of the protocol incl. all relevant infrastructure such as Defender without any downtimes
- We supported and successfully deployed a ve8020 system on Mode
- Implemented and executed on the next iteration of fee processing pipelines
- Go-live of the Rewards Injector v2 infrastructure
- Go-live of our Operations UI
In summary, we already achieved most of our goals and optimized our workflows significantly. A major learning and point of improvement moving forward is the documentation and implementation of easy to follow partner onboarding docs and tools. This will be a focus for Q1 2025 where we will work closely together with the OpCo Product team to achieve this goal.
Initiative 2: Support and execute on the launch of Balancer v3 and new Products
- @ZenDragon and colleagues played a key role in securing important partnerships for the v3 launch during Devcon Bangkok and beyond
- We also played a key role in deploying necessary infrastructure for v3 launch, incl. management of all necessary permissions as well as buffer seeds for boosted pools
- One of our biggest initiatives during Q4 was the design and implementation of a new fee model for v3 which pivoted in BIP-734 incl. a clear core pool framework - we are very proud to have been driving this initiative and getting consensus amongst all ecosystem participants to make the move towards a more healthy and sustainable fee model
Looking forward, our next big focus points are the following:
- In-house development of a fee processing pipeline with the smart contracts team from Balancer labs. The goal is to have reduced dependency on other vendors like Mimic for our v3 instance.
- Drive adoption of Balancer v3 by working together with partners and providing technical and BD support to migrate to boosted pools
In regards to initiative 2, we achieved our outlined goals for a revised fee and core pool model. Now is the time to get Balancer v3 and the gauge system, as well as the new fee structure for both v2 and v3 fully operational. We are very excited to be able to also work on a fully in-house managed fee solution that will reduce costs for the DAO significantly. Note that we will continue to work with Mimic for Balancer v2 as well as v3 where needed.
Initiative 3: Partner Management
Balancer v3 offers a unique business opportunity to attract new liquidity and partnerships. Together with our revised fee model, it is attractive to migrate to v3 and utilize the exciting new tech stack. In terms of objectives we achieved the following:
- Onboarding of existing and new partners to Balancer v3 resulting in more than $30 mln in TVL in the first week after launch
- Liaison for strategic partners like CoWSwap, Gyroscope and QuantAMM
- Facilitating and driving new token adoption with rate provider reviews and improving internal processes, also thanks to the great help from @Mkflow27 and the integrations team
Overall, our partner management goals were exceeded thanks to the excellent work by @ZenDragon and @lipman . Additionally, thanks to the strategy work performed by @Mike_B we will have exciting new products in store for new chain deployments. The best example is the recently published Priority Fee Research article which Balancer Labs will implement for our deployment on Base.
Budget and Personnel Changes in Q4 2024 and Q1 2025
The last quarter of 2024 marked a significant personnel change with the departure of Tritium as a valuable member of the team. Given our new focus on strategy and DevOps execution as well as overall cost optimization, we part ways in good terms. In line with that @gosuto joined our ranks as an experienced developer and financial advisor. Furthermore, we are happy to share that jalbrekt will join the Maxis as a part-time contributor, switching his engagement from an external freelancer. He is an experienced developer as well and made valuable contributions to our fee processing pipelines and will own this domain for Balancer v2 and v3 moving forward.
With these changes, let’s also evaluate our financial footprint with Q4 closing.
Assigned and Spent Discretionary Budget For Q4 2024
| Resort | Amount | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Discretionary | $5,672.92 | Left-over Q3 |
| Discretionary Budget Q4 | $45,000.00 | Budget for Q4 |
As we carried over some more funds from Q3, we had a total of $50’672.92 ready to be allocated. However, we made sure to utilize these funds very conservatively which can be seen in this overview:
| Spendings | Effective | Available | Saved |
|---|---|---|---|
| Discretionary Oct | $8,907.50 | $15,000.00 | $6,092.50 |
| Discretionary Nov | $7,380.00 | $15,000.00 | $7,620.00 |
| Discretionary Dec | $3,405.00 | $15,000.00 | $11,595.00 |
In total, we therefore saved $30’980.42 in Q4 2024 using less than half of the available discretionary funds. A full log of the budgeting can be found here.
Given the offboarding from Tritium, we will additionally save funds from contributor salaries in Q1 2025 which will be reported in an upcoming monthly summary.
Conclusion
I am confident that these updates clearly outlined that we continue to serve the Balancer DAO with the necessary professionalism and resource allocation as expected from such an important mandate. The next quarter will be an important time where we need to focus on establishing Balancer v3 as the primary hub for programmable liquidity. We are excited for what’s to come!