The second quarter of 2024 was dominated by making sure that core infrastructure for reward distribution and allocation can be efficiently handled and maintained. As a result, the Maxis made significant progress on that front as outlined in our Q2 funding proposal. The additional discretionary budget allowed us to complete most work streams and now fully test and integrate new automation pipelines into the DAO workstreams.
Furthermore, the Maxis provided important input and guidance towards testing the new Zen UI and expanding the new documentation suite for Balancer v3 which will be revealed later in July.
Below is a summary of our work conducted
Initiative 1: Transition to a professional DevOps organization with Automation
As Q2 is coming to a close we can assess if we achieved our outlined objectives for Q2:
1. Fee Sweep Automation
- We have a new bal_tools repository vastly refactoring the code base, making it more modular and easy to use based on the learnings we gathered from working with the protocol_fee_allocator repository
- Overall workload to create and review payloads significantly decreased and we are able to ship more than $750k in fees monthly without major incidents
- We advised Mimic on improving their reporting and cross-check their data with our subgraph fee views for full transparency on how funds flow
- We improved vlAURA voting incentive placement by increasing the minimum amount of incentives placed for a few rounds. We later decreased that amount again based on market conditions. Oversight and monitoring of this parameter leads to best results as of now
2. vlAURA Voting
- This initiative took longer than expected because of technical hurdles with the integration of Snapshot API which could be overcome in June 2024
- We now have a nearly fully automated solution where BD can provide a sheet with incentives to be placed which generates a payload that can be reviewed and signed by Maxis. This leads to great transparency and less errors in the process
- Routines for automatic relocking of our vlAURA position has not yet been developed. We are now first completing the full lock of Balancer DAOs vesting position. Afterwards it will make sense to automate the relocking with a potential SAFE module
3. OZ Defender Migration
- The code base was successfully migrated to OZ Defender v2 in May / June
- We further improved the code base and decreased gas usage thereafter
- In June we migrated to the new subgraph endpoints and also upgraded to Node 20 as per OZ requirements
- We completed the CI/CD integration incl. provisioning in this repository
4. Rewards Injector v2
- Smart contract dev work for the Rewards injector v2 has been completed and internally audited by Wonderland
- A full suite of integration tests has been developed and guidance from Wonderland taken to get full test coverage
- First test deployments are underway and are being tested on L2 chains
- We expect the new version to go in PROD in Q3 2024
5. Gauges and Core pools
- We now have fully integrated the automatic core pool detection in our code base
- The next step is to integrate this task in the new API (api-v3). This includes cross-referencing of YB token requirements and rate provider reviews. This part is essential for us to distribute rewards to core pool gauges in an automated way
- Gauge removal flagging has not been implemented yet but will be picked up in Q3. The Maxis decided to wait on this initiative until v3 launches to get a better overview of how to handle gauges for v2 and v3
Additional Dev Work
- We have advised karpatkey on how to fetch and interpret our DAO treasury data
- We continue to maintain DeFilytica analytics and tooling deployments for Balancer and AURA DAOs (improvement of code base, adding new features, subgraph migration)
Discretionary Budget Breakdown - end of June 2024
| Project | Budget spent |
|---|---|
| Injector V2 | $2’910 |
| Snapshot Automation | $1’800 |
| Fee Allocator Refactoring | $3’000 |
| Safe Tx Builder Module | $1’920 |
| Governance Reviews | $3’750 |
| Infrastructure costs (Antiscam bot, subscriptions) | $1’430 |
| Infrastructure Maintenance (upgrades etc) | $555 |
Overall, the Maxis dedicated another $15’365 discretionary budget to various work packages as outlined above in June. As outlined in our funding proposal for Q3 we reduced our cost footprint by a total of $51’000 of which 28’280 is attributable to savings in the discretionary budget. As always, the Maxis try to handle these funds very conservatively which is reflected in these numbers. A small surplus of $1’800 has now been carried over to Q3 as we used less work hours than anticipated (170 instead of 200). These funds will be properly accounted for in the next update and funding proposal.
Initiative 2: Grow Balancer v2 and Support v3 Design
1. Supporting v3 Design
- Xeonus wrote a complete partner onboarding guide for Balancer v2. We decided together with the Beethoven-X Technical and BLabs teams that the v3 docs should be the place to support any deployment guides, incl. Balancer v2. The new documentation should make it easier for partners to onboard to Balancer tech
- The Maxis took the lead on setting up a Zen UI beta testing program under the lead of Tritium. The testing program resulted in many bugfixes and will result in a significantly better launch product when it will be revealed in Q3
2. Supporting v2 Growth
- The Maxis continuously advise dozens of partners on how to create pools, check in rate providers or how to leverage our core pool system.
- We also made sure that the new chain deployments are properly tested and integrated for launch. These include Mode and Fraxtal. In June, we concluded the veBAL gauge setup for Fraxtal by wiring up final permission sets
- One big success was the approval of CoWAMM which was mainly led by MikeB. CoWAMM will go live later in Q3 after audits have concluded. By working together with karpatkey, we ensure optimal incentive distribution and DAO alignment
Conclusion
Looking back at Q2, we can confidently say that we achieved all major milestones in a timely and cost effective manner. Most of our automation and development initiatives could be completed thanks to the increased discretionary budget for freelancers. This model worked out well for us and the automation work leads to more secure on-chain operations and gives us more room to work on other important projects in the future. We will continue to serve the DAO passionately and make sure that the partner and user experience is seamless while on-chain operations work smoothly.