July was a fairly busy month on several fronts. Balancer governance was extremely active with multiple hotly debated proposals and very close voting results. Maxis enthusiastically engaged with other ecosystem participants in these discussions. As always we continue to represent Balancer’s best interests as we see them. Beyond that there was a steady stream of new gauges being added, tokens being whitelisted, conversations happening across Discord and Telegram. Despite the difficult market conditions, Balancer remains a hub of activity.
Maxis also dedicated a lot of time towards two key strategic initiatives - Optimism partnership with BeethovenX and BIP-19. Optimism will soon undergo a transition towards yield bearing tokens and we are in touch with various partners on this initiative. Expect the first Optimism gauges to be added to veBAL voting in August. BIP-19 has seen two rounds of protocol fee distributions and the early results are very encouraging. TVL in “core pools” has shown strong growth as has protocol revenue. It is too early to draw any firm conclusions, as market fluctuations play a large part in the data. More to come in the following weeks and months.
With that, here are the bullet point updates for July. For reference, please review BIP-18 which funded the Balancer Maxis for Q3.
- Multisig Management
- Three pools had swap fees adjusted (AURA/wETH & the two graviAURA pools)
- Six new gauges were approved & added to the voting list
- 135 GNO was distributed to COW/GNO LP’s at the request of Gnosis
- Two protocol fee distributions took place for a total of $758k (bribes, Treasury, veBAL)
- The DAO Multisig executed a total of 8 transactions
- Governance
- The Governance Council approved 18 proposals for snapshot voting
- Several proposals hit 30+ forum replies with a large part of that engagement being driven by Maxis
- Four out of the six Maxis are active delegates with current combined voting power of ~186.6k veBAL
- Optimism
- ~$9.5M TVL at peak, $14.7k revenue sent to veBAL so far.
- Introductory incentives end on August 5th, then we transition to veBAL voting.
- Look for wstETH, rETH, and Aave boosted pools to arrive soon(™)
- BIP-19
- The two protocol fee distributions under BIP-19 both saw new records in Balancer’s bribing market.
- TVL in “core pools” has shown strong growth, particularly on Polygon in the stMATIC pools which have gained ~100% in TVL since BIP-19.
- See more detailed stats here.
- Metagovernance: Used Balancer’s ~2.6M TRIBE to vote in three Fei snapshots
- User/Project Support
- Eight pull requests made to the frontend repo for adding new pools and/or new tokens to the UI
- Discord has seen solid activity this month, as have the various project Telegram chats we’re in
- Weekly testing of the UI continues!
- Community
- July Coordinape round is now open
- A new framework for Coordinape has been published
- 6 contributors are taking part in our onboarding process (2 are new in July)
- We’ve been following-up on conversations, scheduling 1:1 calls and helping them navigate Balancer on ways to contribute on a value-added way
- BalancerDAO’s health-check survey for July goes out this week
- DAO Dev Work
- An optimized veBAL calculator and BPT estimator have been launched on Balancer Tools
- An optimized price impact and swap simulator has been released on Balancer Tools
- Work has begun to migrate analytics to the official balancer subgraph in light of sunsetting of the Graph hosted service
- Improvements to the official developer and user documentation are under review by Balancer Labs
- Record Keeping
- The Maxi notion is a wealth of information but there is still more documentation to be done.
The monthly community call with the Maxis will be held today, July 27th, at 1pm EST in Balancer’s discord. See you there!