[BIP-3] Allocate BAL towards Etherem<>Optimism Bridge Liquidity

Governance General Proposal
1

Motivation

Balancer recently launched on Optimism in collaboration with BeethovenX. This deployment will soon utilize veBAL gauges for BAL emissions so it is important that BAL maintains adequate liquidity and price equivalence with Ethereum. To get around the 7 day withdrawal period on the official Optimism bridge which breaks the necessary arbitrage loop with Ethereum I have enlisted the help of Multichain. They have added support for BAL between Ethereum and Optimism, however it requires liquidity to be functional.

Thus, I propose allocating BAL from the treasury for this purpose. Please see the poll at the bottom which will serve as a temp check on the amount. Note that we would earn bridge fees on any funds deposited for bridge liquidity.

The treasury currently holds ~4M BAL so you can calculate the impact to the treasury from there depending on your poll choice.

Risk

  • Multichain is exploited and our BAL is lost. You can find information about their security model here.

  • Users only bridge in one direction, i.e. Optimism-> Ethereum and instead use the official bridge for Ethereum-> Optimism. This would see bridge liquidity on one side drained and we would be unable to withdraw our BAL until this was resolved somehow.

Specification

If approved, 40,000 BAL would be sent from the DAO Multisig 0x10A19e7eE7d7F8a52822f6817de8ea18204F2e4f to the LM Multisig 0xc38c5f97B34E175FFd35407fc91a937300E33860 and deposited 50/50 on both sides of the bridge.

  • 80k BAL total
  • 60k BAL total
  • 40k BAL total
  • 20k BAL total
  • Do not do this

0 voters

2 Likes
2

This proposal brings great value to the community. Additionally, we can do something useful with our Treasury BAL. I fully support this proposal.

2 Likes
3

I agree that this proposal adds value to the community. I voted for 40k as that is roughly 1% of the current treasury. That seemed to be a correct amount from a gut feeling perspective.

I don’t have knowledge on how much of a native protocol token is actually needed to facilitate a good bridging experience long term. If anyone is knowledgeable in this space please chime in.

4 Likes
4

Great initiative! Thanks for leading the charge as always @solarcurve.
I also voted for 40K. It seems to be enough capacity for this use case.

4 Likes
5

Let’s do it. Great proposal - 40K got my vote.

2 Likes
6

This is a great way to support the ecosystem. We support 40k too.

1 Like
7

Makes complete sense, cool to see the treasury used in a value add perspective! voted for 40k as well :slight_smile:

1 Like
8

https://snapshot.org/#/balancer.eth/proposal/0x00a742a0d9f4d776acd61172614f1932926d587d021c666a8e4a210a25096bf5

1 Like