Balancer Maxis mid-Q1 2024 Update

Service Providers Balancer Maxis
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Sorry for being a little late, fam! But here it is. This quarter, we skipped the January report for a mid-quarter update.

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Balancer has been thriving in the LSD/LRT metagame. With the Maxis and BD team on a killing spree, the recent market pump put us back on the $1b mark! Kudos to all involved! Also some honorable mentions to exciting ve80/20 projects like Alchemix and the new Aave’s Safety Module, finally bringing one of our most beloved partners to v2.

Let’s take a look at our proposed initiatives and how they are progressing. For reference, please review [BIP-514] which funded the Balancer Maxis for Q1/2024, and make sure to check Maxi’s Notion and GitHub with continued additions being made.

Initiative 1: Growth beyond Mainnet

We have mainly focused on the execution of the Arbitrum’s STIP grant, sharing regular updates with the community on their forum. January’s STIP related activities have involved working with Radiant, Beefy and Frax to bring together STIP incentives and create new relationships. Notably, we brought sFRAX to Arbitrum as the first blue chip interest bearing USD.

The program of incentives on Balancer was prolonged until the end of March, resulting in a drop in weekly incentives to 82285.3 ARB. KPI’s sustained reasonably well given the sharp decline in $ARB emissions, showing Arbitrum’s 30-40% dominance on BAL emissions in L2s.


Source: https://dune.com/balancer/vebal

We have been coordinating with the data teams from Balancer Labs and Openblock, constantly monitoring the performance, advising and iterating. With an oath to our KPI-focused approach, we aim for a lasting value-add proposition and Arbitrum’s LTIP for the continuation of this project. Please read January STIP reports: Report 4 and Report 5 for more details. We have also been liaising with marketing to get more eyes on our STIP reporting and success.

Initiative 2: Redesign of the Gauge Framework v1

We’ve made a deep dive to reassess the current gauge framework and concluded that the initially planned implementation of dynamic gauge caps and optimistic voting pose a too high risk/reward ratio in the current setup. Instead, we identified four high-impact work streams that will focus on the following in the upcoming weeks until end of Q1:

  • Vastly improved partner onboarding documentation and experience
  • Improvements to our gauge onboarding automation
  • Focus on data products / data insights to better understand our core pool flywheel
  • Implementation of gauge removal detection automation

See the full report here.

Initiative 3: Support Balancer v3 Design

All the technical teams on BLabs and OpCo are hard at work on Balancer v3. The Maxis have taken the role of serving as liaisons and point of contact between external teams building on Balancer that can enjoy the new set of new features planned for the upcoming launch. That involves our ecosystem networking on interviews, documentation review, and lots of iterations.

Much work has been put into fostering the development of LVR mitigation mechanisms built on top of v3. Not too much can be shared publicly at this time but there are several highly qualified teams that will be building out their mechanisms on Balancer v3. Additionally, the infrastructure for Balancer v3 hooks is being actively developed that will enable the next generation of innovation to be built on Balancer.

Initiative 4: Automation ownership transfer & on-chain automation improvements

Unfortunately, @Shakotan has been offboarded from Maxis and has taken up new work at Radiant. As a result, here is an update of where we stand on Automation in Q1.

  • We will reassess the migration of the OZ Defender task, now being short-handed.
  • Automation focus in January was mostly around improving workflows surrounding Fee Management and STIP distribution.
  • ChildChainGaugeInjectV2 development underway, collecting feedback on the interface.
  • Fee handling focused on improving the successful Mimic integrations.

Here are the granular updates for January.

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