PR with Payload
Background
Solarcurve has decided to take a break from the Maxis to delve into the world of DeFi and rediscover his Chad spirit. As part of Solars transition, the team has dedicated substantial time to introspect on our mission, compensation structure, and previous feedback regarding compensation proposals for both the Maxis and other Service Providers (SPs). This funding proposal, unlike its recent predecessors, aims to establish a clear and unified definition of our scope, mandate, and the proposed budget to fund the Maxis until the end of 2023.
Revised Scope and Mandate:
Based on our recent reflections surrounding the work we have been and are currently doing, and how it creates value and/or is important for the ecosystem, we wrote this Maxi Mandate and Scope:
Process of determining Compensation Budget
Following the completion of the revised Mandate and Scope above, we each individually assessed our time commitments to the Maxis and engaged in candid discussions about compensation rates. Additionally, Gleb, Cosme, and Dubstar, responsible for support and community safety, were included in the compensation discussions alongside the rest of the Maxis team. Shakotn is increasing his workload in the Maxis as we move to automate the last bits that Solar was doing by hand.
From that we concluded, the total USD pay requested across all proposed contributors committing to a total of 7.75 FTE (full-time equivalent) of committed work (we all do more), including 0.75 FTE of budget for additional operations/engineering resources where more. redundancy is required. The areas of operation for our contributor roster span disciplines including:
- Strategy & Business Development
- Governance and Protocol Operations
- DevOps and Automation Engineering
- Economics
- Eco-system coordination
- Community Management
From this point, we discounted each contributors pay by 20 and then offered all Maxi contributors the opportunity to swap liquid USDC pay for 1 year locked auto-compounding auraBAL at a rate of 1.6X.
41.6% of the USDC took advantage of this program. BAL was priced on 17-09-2023 at 3.25 USD, resulting in the following requested People budget for the Maxis:
| Quarter | USD in BAL | $BAL | USDC | Total Comp | % in vested BAL |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Q4 (next) | $103,008.00 | 31,694.77 | $148,770.00 | $251,778.00 | 40.91% |
| Q3 (last) | $114,510.00 | 25,400.00 | $132,630.00 | $247,140.00 | 46.33% |
| USD in BAL | $BAL | USDC | Total Comp | % change | |
| Change | -$11,502.00 | 6,294.77 | $16,140.00 | $4,638.00 | 1.88% |
Further an additional 20 ETH is requested to cover gas costs in Q4. Gas spending last quarter was mostly used dealing with migrations. Maxi Gas spend can be reviewed here:
https://dune.com/scoffie/advancedmaxigasstation?undefined=
Vesting auraBAL
Locking veBAL for a year involves:
- Serious tax complications
- A year of diminishing returns fee flows and bribs.
- The requirement to keep a high number of wallets holding veBAL with different end dates.
The Maxis are working to instead develop a locking contract with the following features:
- Accepts auraBAL on Arbitrum and stakes it in the pounder there.
- Allows the beneficiary to claim any earned $AURA and unvested auraBAL.
- Accepts multiple deposits with different dates and lock durations.
- Allows sweeping of the contract with the approval of both the DAO multisig and the beneficiary in case something changes.
On or around the date that Q4 funds are received the Maxis will use the full BAL allocation for the quarter to deposit directly into auraBAL. Once the vesting contracts are finished and reviewed, auraBAL will be transferred into the contracts with a lock duration such that they will unlock on October 1st 2024.
Based on feedback to this BIP, we additionally request 20,000 USDC as an available budget to focus on building a community business development and sales facility. The Maxis role in BD is more focused on operations and advisory as subject matter experts. We’re happy to take on the challenge of finding community members who have the right skillset and passion to bring in new partners. This budget may not be spent, but als always we will do our best to make some progress here/get something started here and be cost effective in doing so.
Finally, we’ll ask for an additional 20 ETH from the treasury for gas expenses. You can check out this dashboard 3 we commissioned to track gas spending. This may require supplemental funding during the quarter depending on ETH gas prices and if gas intensive activities increase, such as poking additional layer zero cross chain rate providers.
Service Provider Name: Balancer Maxis
Contributors
Core Maxis: Mike B, Zekraken, Xeonus, Zen Dragon, Danko, and Tritium.
The Ballers: Cosme, Gleb, Dubstard, Shakotan
Interns: Gosuto(maybe)
Pledge to abide by the DAO’s Code of Conduct (or link to your own): Yes
Pledge to abide by the Accountability Guidelines : Yes
Domains of Operation + Key Objectives & Success Metrics:
Domains of Operation and Scope of Work:
Word doc we are working on.
Key Objectives per operational discipline:
Strategy and Business Development
- Provide consultancy services on how to best deploy liquidity and leverage Balancer tech
- Deploy and optimize Omni-chain LSD liquidity in partnership with Chainlink.
- Applying for co-incentive grants.
Governance and Protocol Operations
- Governance
- Conduct weekly forum/snapshot voting process.
- Build, verify and coordination execution of multisig payloads to enact approved governance in a timely manner.
- Coordinate changes with voters, vote markets, wrappers and various other participants in the veBAL ecosystem.
- Help governance manage risk by:
- Identifying/strongly advising against dangerous governance decisions
- Coordinating with OpCo to identify and whitelist properly configured pools for the UI after creation.
- Protocol Operations
- Development and administration of revenue collection and distribution systems:
- Fee Collection (in tandem with Mimic)
- Fee Distribution as per BIP-19 and various additional governance proposals.
- Administration of direct incentives from partnerships and grants.
- Development and administration of revenue collection and distribution systems:
Maxi Ecosystem Coordination
- Facilitate legal/business contract execution for BizDev activities
- Training and developing community contributors (Ballers) reducing downtime for users and bridging to tech teams and support
- Discord management and Ecosystem Notion revamp (website and repository)
- Event and travel planning
- Balancer Foundation Director’s workshop
- Ecosystem ONsite (April/24)
- Future hack-a-tons
Length of Engagement & Budget
3 months.
Budget of 48,590 USDC per month for salaries and 10,565 BAL per month. Of this, 5950 USDC per month and 270 BAL per month are for joining members or bounty work/discretionary funding. We also request an allocation of 20 ETH for gas expenses and 20,000 USDC for BD bounties as described above.
Total for 3 month engagement: 168,770 USDC, 31,695 BAL and 20 ETH (ETH and BizDev Bounty is excluded in the following comparison).
Comparison against last quarter: Not including the BD budget, this proposal represents an increase of 6,295 $BAL and 16,140 USDC vs last quarter. The increase in BAL tokens represents a decrease of -$11,502 in USD value of BAL token compensation when using the BAL price of 4.40 USD for last quarter and 3.25 USD for Q4. The total increase in USD value of tokens paid in is 1.88% with 40.91% of USD value locked vs 46.33% last quarter.
The 20,000 USDC BD increase brings the total USDC spend up 31,640 vs last quarter for a 10% change in total spend with 37.9% staked this quarter vs 46.33% in Q3.
Funds to transfer: 168,770 USDC and 31,695 BAL and 20 ETH
Note that $14.220 in USDC is still unspent/unallocated from Q3/23, but there are a few outstanding engagements still ongoing that may be paid by these funds. The Maxis will provide a complete report about the 30,000 USDC Q3 discretionary budget expenditures by Nov 1st.
Impact on the Treasury: The Treasury currently holds ~4.3M BAL. Funding the Balancer Maxis for Q3 would cost around 0.7% of the treasury’s BAL holdings, which annualizes to ~2.9% of the treasury’s BAL. The Treasury currently holds ~4.58M in USDC. Funding the USDC portion would cost around 3% of the treasury’s USDC, which annualizes to ~12%.
ETH Address to Receive Funds: 0x166f54F44F271407f24AA1BE415a730035637325
Link to SLA (if going through the Foundation: N/A
Changes to Signer Set
As @solarcurve is leaving, and @Shakotan is managing the automation that covers aspects of Solars work. It is proposed to swap Solar for Shak on in the Balancer Maxi Signer set. This grants signership to a number of 3/6 multisigs. Safes, signers and permissions can understood by reviewing this Table in the docs.
This BIP instructions that on all Maxi Signer Sets Safes, Solarcurve 0x512fce9B07Ce64590849115EE6B32fd40eC0f5F3 is replaced with Shakotan: 0x8053484489b110181a6dba0b59dda887e433f470
Specifications
The DAO Multisig 0x10A19e7eE7d7F8a52822f6817de8ea18204F2e4f will interact with USDC 0xA0b86991c6218b36c1d19D4a2e9Eb0cE3606eB48 by writing transfer passing the Maxis Multisig address as the recipient 0x166f54F44F271407f24AA1BE415a730035637325 and amount 168770000000
The DAO Multisig 0x10A19e7eE7d7F8a52822f6817de8ea18204F2e4f will interact with BAL 0xba100000625a3754423978a60c9317c58a424e3D by writing transfer passing the Maxis Multisig address as the recipient 0x166f54F44F271407f24AA1BE415a730035637325 and amount 31695000000000000000000
The DAO Multisig 0x10A19e7eE7d7F8a52822f6817de8ea18204F2e4f will interact with WETH 0xC02aaA39b223FE8D0A0e5C4F27eAD9083C756Cc2 by writing deposit with amount 20 to wrap the required ETH. Afterwards the DAO Multisig 0x10A19e7eE7d7F8a52822f6817de8ea18204F2e4f will interact with WETH 0xC02aaA39b223FE8D0A0e5C4F27eAD9083C756Cc2 by writing transfer passing the Maxis Multisig address as the recipient 0x166f54F44F271407f24AA1BE415a730035637325 and amount 20000000000000000000
