With May coming to a close, the Maxis contributed significantly to important strategic workstreams to the DAO. We continued to make good progress in our DevOps initiatives, supported BLabs with new chain deployments and are continuing to work with ecosystem participants to optimize protocol operations. As always, the Maxis stay true to the DAO spirit and support its development with the most possible impact.
As with the previous report, I will summarize and outline our progress in May and present the overall budget situation for on demand development resources.
Initiative 1: Transition to a professional DevOps organization with Automation
As outlined in the last monthly report, Maxis are operating key infrastructure to the DAO while decentralizing it as much as possible with automation work.
This month, we made following progress:
1. Fee Sweep Automation
- We extensively monitored core pool performance and adjusted the fee logic to
- (1) optimize for the minimum voting incentive amount on AURA markets and
- (2) to accommodate for fee distribution to stay within good boundaries for the vote weights. Several adjustments were made to the code base to handle this more efficiently
- We ran several rounds successfully with our automatic core pool detection system and there is no more need to maintain the core pool whitelist manually
- Furthermore, we refactored our code base to use Balancer’s API v3. This was a key action item from the Lisbon data workshop that we continue to conclude
- We also created a template repository for future chain grant token allocations based on our previous STIP code base
- Refactoring of the code base has commenced and can be tracked in the newly created bal_tools repository
2. vlAURA voting
- The AURA voting round concluding May 27th was the first successful round where votes were relayed through the Snapshot sequencer. With this milestone complete, we can now finalize the automated voting process making it rather easy for the BizDev team to set up Balancers vlAURA allocation
3. OZ Defender Migration
- As previously mentioned, this task was successfully completed at the end of April. We finalized the migration and also took over checkpointing jobs for BAL rewards on Optimism from the Beethoven-X engineering team
- Overall, gas usage has been optimized and our checkpointers require less ETH each week. We are constantly monitoring the performance. See our gas station dashboard for historical usage metrics. A detailed report on overall gas usage will be shared later this quarter.
4. Rewards Injector v2
- Work on migrating from brownie to hardhat for development has been completed
- Integration test suite with hardhat has been progressed
- New deployment process and README has been updated
Additional Development work conducted for data and automation
- We have been working together with Hypernative to set up new monitoring for our infrastructure such as rate provider updates, gauge upkeeps and other mission-critical on-chain events.
Development budget breakdown - end of May 2024
| Project | Budget spent |
|---|---|
| Injector V2 | $2’250 |
| Snapshot Automation | $1’860 |
| Fee Allocator Refactoring | $2’700 |
| Misc tasks | $250 |
The total quarterly budget for on-demand dev work is $60k USDC of which until now $10’020 USDC has been used in April and $7’060 in May resulting in $17’080 in total so far. The budget continues to be well within limits and the Maxis continue to allocate it as optimally as possible.
Initiative 2: Grow Balancer v2 and Support v3 Design
Status on supporting v3 design
- Xeonus started support on writing Partner Onboarding documentation for Balancer v2 and v3 in the new v3 docs deployment
- Xeonus will also support further improvements to the Balancer v3 docs incl. Page navigation, content reviews and adjustment of the styling language to fit the new overall theme
- Tritium set up a beta testing program for the new UI for Balancer v3 together with the front-end team. The beta testing program will reward testers with BAL via Coordinape if the corresponding proposal passes
Status on v2 growth
- The Maxis have helped to set up new chain deployments for Mode and Fraxtal deployments as seen in BIP-613
- MikeB consulted with CoW DAO to formulate the exciting CoWAMM proposal that will go to vote in early June which will significantly contribute to Balancers footprint in the LVR space
General contributions
- We have been in close contact with karpatkey to establish a more transparent and detailed accounting framework for the DAO. We will share more details, once this work package is ready to share
- Additionally, the Maxis consulted with karpatkey to further optimize the DAOs treasury management incl. reviews of their new permission set request
Conclusion
The Maxis are overall well on track and we are confident that we can conclude all our proposed work packages until the end of June. We expect that the overall workload will increase given new chain deployments, beta testing support and overall support for feature reveals surrounding Balancer v3.
Overall, the Maxis are excited and honored to continue to be part of Balancer’s success.