Summary
- Fee Processing: We achieved full integration of the new Cow Burner infrastructure, enabling fee sweeping operations to run in CI. We are also collaborating with Beets to integrate their Optimism fee processing into our robust pipeline.
- Analytics: We contributed key insights by building the Balancer Alliance and Protocol Performance dashboards.
- Governance: We introduced and executed a new governance process that significantly improved operations.
- Business Development: We maintained a strong presence at ETHCC in Cannes, where we served as a liaison between BD initiatives and technical feasibility assessments for numerous potential leads.
- Chain Expansion: We are pushing forward with launching a new high-potential chain deployment.
- Infrastructure: We successfully migrated AURA lock management.
Initiative 1: Onchain Operations and Security Management (DevSecOps)
Fee Processing Infrastructure Optimization
The new fee processing infrastructure has reached a state where it operates almost hands-free. After several iterations with the smart contracts team, we established a solid combination of burners and our offchain infrastructure. Our new infrastructure has proven resilient enough to handle special fee runs, including processing Fraxtal fees. As a final milestone, we successfully integrated a Mimic burner on Avalanche and are now collaborating with Beets to integrate their fee processing into the same Mimic infrastructure pattern, demonstrating that our solutions are scalable.
DAO Multi-sig Operations
The most notable operational executions for June included:
- Migration of the DAO’s vlAURA position to a new safe
- Assistance with kpk treasury asset migration, including reviews of transaction payloads
- Elimination of over 20 stale gauges
- Comprehensive review of the new kpk subroles module with external auditor assistance
- Processing of payment requests
- Standard daily operations including pool monitoring, optimizations, and incentive management
Our operations setup successfully handled the high demand for on-chain executions. The new team composition has proven efficient enough to cover all on-chain operations requests.
Security Infrastructure Development
Balancer v2 CSPv6 pool monitoring is now fully operational in production, marking a significant milestone for both our team and Hypernative. Simultaneously, we refined the architecture to monitor Balancer v3 infrastructure and are overseeing Hypernative’s engineering efforts for a new safe module scheduled for release in Q3 2025.
Operations UI Enhancements
The Operations UI received several major enhancements, including improved UX for core components and better performance through reduced load times for injector viewers and configurators. We also completed an Emergency payload builder and are developing a payload composer that will enable operators to bundle complex payloads more easily. We are pleased to see increased partner usage of the Operations UI for incentive management, which is becoming a hands-free process for the Maxis team.
Analytics
We released two comprehensive Dune dashboards that showcase the Protocol’s overall performance:
Initiative 2: Growth and Strategic Partnerships
Supporting BD Efforts in Cannes
ETHCC in Cannes provided an excellent opportunity to engage with strategic stakeholders and key partners. While most discussions remain in early negotiation stages, they will be made public once finalized. We observed strong demand for Balancer technology, with new pool types like ReCLAMMs being products that other protocols want to utilize extensively in the future.
Chain Expansion and Partner Integration
We are currently working on a high-potential chain expansion that will effectively showcase Balancer technology’s strengths. Most core infrastructure has been deployed, and we are in the final testing stages before presenting a governance proposal to go live. Stay tuned for updates!
Initiative 3: Interfacing with Product Development
The focus of this month has been supporting creation of pools for various new partners and tokens. This includes the creation of new rate providers and registering of ERC4626s. Time has also been spent getting the reCLAMM product ready for production by helping BLabs unit test across a few iterations of the new code. Lastly, optimization of pool parameters is a focus, we decided to update the settings on a number of pools either based on internal judgement or by direction of partners
- Continued testing of reCLAMM products, have now created and tested common workflows on ~30 pools.
- Adjusted around 20 stable surge pools to maximize volume (amp factor and surge threshold) while still helping protect the peg. USDf pool highlighted the usefulness of the stable surge hook; also built a small webapp that helps support optimization.
- 3 new rate providers and erc4626 vaults registered, around 7 new pools created for partners
- Continued to manage the AVAX incentive program for another month to make sure rewards were scheduled for pools and no gaps of incentives existed
Budget for June 2025
The majority of our discretionary budget supported collaboration with raqq, a talented community contributor who is helping us improve the Operations UI. Based on overall demand and his excellent work, we are evaluating hiring him as a fixed part-time engineer for our team. The discretionary budget provides the flexibility to efficiently implement new features as a team.
| Resource | Amount | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Operations UI | $3,000 | UI/UX and performance improvements to payload builders, injector viewers, and configurators, as well as hook management. Prototyping and implementation of a payload builder composer enabling bundling of complex payloads |
At the close of Q2, we saved $4,710 USDC from the $15,000 USDC allocated for that quarter. This does not yet account for additional savings generated from Zen Dragon’s departure, which will be summarized in the final monthly report for the funding round in August 2025. Current projections indicate total savings of approximately $40,000 USDC that will be carried over for the next funding request. Note that the projected audit for the kpk managed safe payload reviews got reduced from $2k to $1.5k. Which is included in overall savings projections.
Conclusion
Looking back at Q2, I want to summarize our achievements with both successes and challenges:
Successes
- Achieved all operational improvement goals
- Continued delivery of excellent white-glove services with very short response times for partner requests
- Successful scaling of operations infrastructure
- Efficient team utilization
Challenges
- Fee processing go-live took significantly longer than expected
- Loss of Zen Dragon and generally high turnover in the Maxis team over the past six months