Summary
January can be summarized by focusing our efforts on engineering and process optimizations such as:
- The development of a new fee processing pipeline for Balancer v3
- Streamlining partner docs and operations UI functionality
- White glove partnership management with the focus on v3 growth
- Protocol, multi-sig and treasury management
- Increase protocol security
Personnel changes
We have continued to optimize our team composition throughout our funding period. The final change involves the full-time engagement of @gosuto starting January 2025 as well as the transition from a freelance contract to a part-time engagement for jalbrekt. This new team composition will allow us to have more steady development resources while reducing our cost overhead with discretionary funds which is reflected in our monthly spendings report further below.
Initiative 1: Scale Balancer’s On-Chain DevOps Hub
- We continue to guarantee seamless operations and security monitoring for the Balancer ecosystem
- Our new fee processing pipeline is now live in production and has been successfully executed for two fee rounds
- We coordinated and implemented a new framework to handle secondary market rewards stemming from boosted pools
- Continuously improved partner documentation and operations such as our new incentives management docs
- Testing and integration of Paladin marketplace historical data and infrastructure to automatically place voting incentive quests
- Increasing security measures by collaborating with Hypernative on CSP v6 pause functionality and a new security and monitoring setup for Balancer v3
In summary, we are close to complete our objectives for our funding period, while now having the capacity to take over more responsibilities for DAO operations which is exactly what we wanted to achieve the last quarter.
Initiative 2: Support and execute on the launch of Balancer v3 and new Products
- With v3 in production for over a month, @ZenDragon and @lipman found a lot of issues that revolved around our new boosted pool infrastructure and safe UX. Thanks to their tireless efforts, and superb partner service, they helped in identifying and resolving many issues that will also be resolved with a new composite router in the works by BLabs
- Our chain expansion efforts are well underway and BD efforts have been aligned to push Arbitrum and Base deployments
- Our continued focus is to finalize and ship fee processing for Balancer v3 so that the new core pool framework can be fully vetted in and activated - both on Balancer v2 (no more non-core pool fee redirects) and v3 (fee collection and voting incentive placement)
Looking forward we are continuing to use the positive momentum of stable pools and will
- Roll out exciting partnerships and pools on Arbitrum and Base
- Drive further adoption of v3 by working together with leading lending protocols like Aave and Morpho.
- Implementation of fee collection and core pool incentives for v3
Initiative 3: Partner Management
We are seeing an increased demand for boosted pool technology - something that only the Balancer protocol can offer. @ZenDragon and @lipman have been working tirelessly to drive adoption. We realized that some technical issues persist, most prominently UX around safe support for DAOs and trading routes / ERC4626 standards. Both issues are being addressed by the front-end, API and smart contract teams thanks to the direct and quick partner feedback @ZenDragon and the Maxis collected.
As mentioned at the end of Q4 2024, the goals for partner management were greatly exceeded. @ZenDragon and @lipman are key drivers of Balancer v3 adoption which is reflected in over $30 mln in TVL across Mainnet and Gnosis chain, with more liquidity inflow to follow for Arbitrum and Base.
Budget for January 2025
Based on our personnel changes, we could further optimize our budget. We did not have to spend discretionary funds and could allocate some of the savings from @Tritium ‘s departure to salaries
Assigned and Spent Discretionary Budget For January 2025
| Resort | Amount | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Discretionary budget | $15,000 USDC | Budget for January |
Spendings: $0 USDC
As of January 2025, the Maxis have only spent $14,597 out of the $60,000 USDC allocated up until end of the month, resulting in effective savings of $75,403 USDC up until now. Most of these savings will carry over into the next funding request at the end of Q1 2025.
Full accounting of budgeting can be consulted in our previous monthly reports and has also been communicated to @karpatkey according to the new reporting guidelines as outlined in BIP-742.
Conclusion
Despite increased market volatility, we see significant and positive increase in demand for Balancer. Our new optimized team composition and process optimizations guarantee continued disruption-free operations of the protocol. Onwards!