[BIP-474] Activate BAL Emissions for Mainnet GBPT:USDC "FX Pool" with 2% emission cap

PR with Payload

Summary

PoundToken’s mission is to be the fully regulated GBP stablecoin of choice that allows for a true 24/7 real-time settlement and we are excited to have the opportunity to have the Balancer community be a part of this journey.

PoundToken is the first regulated issuer of a fully cash collateralized stable token called GBPT that comes with independent Proof of Reserves out of the gate. Every GBPT token is fully FIAT backed by 1 GBP in our bank account.

Our vision is to enable both retail consumers and financial institutions to leverage the power of GBP within the DeFi space and beyond. We are looking to Balancer as a great entry point into the arena and are excited to be offering exclusive incentives for those looking to help PoundToken in this initial distribution phase.

PoundToken is planning to set up a GBPT:USDC FX Pool that will enable liquidity providers to earn BAL Emissions as well as a starting 2% yield on all GBPT that is provisioned into the pool.

References/Useful links

Links:

Protocol Description

PoundToken has primarily been used OTC and listed on CEXs such as gate.io. We are now however looking to leverage Xave’s FXPool to enable an accurate stablecoin exchange between GBPT & USDC for the Balancer DAO and its community.

Motivation

PoundToken will continue to build use cases for this pool to encourage more liquid FX trades. We are looking to distribute GBPT further into the Ethereum ecosystem while at the same time starting to scale out our offering to multiple L2s so that we can issue natively on them.

A great use case we are already exploring is enabling local UK based companies that are typically taking payments or receiving investments in USDC right now to be able to swap into GBPT to reduce their FX exposure. This pool would play a pivotal role in enabling this.

Specifications

  1. Governance:
    Governance of the pool will be done via snapshot for now.

  2. Oracles:
    By leveraging Xave’s FXPools the GBPT:USDC pair will utilize a Chainlink oracle to allow FX accurate swaps for a predetermined range of the bonding curve. Beyond this range (called the “beta region”), LP ratio then dictates the price of trades. At this point, arbitrageurs are incentivized by significantly cheaper fees to trade the pool back to the “beta region” where FX price is followed. LPs are also incentivized to keep liquidity in the pool especially while it is outside the “beta region”, due to existing parameters that yield much higher fees charged to traders swapping the pool away from the “beta region”.

  3. Audits:
    Tech Audits – poundtoken
    FXPool Final Audit - Xave Finance

  4. Centralization vectors:
    3/3 operations multisig that owns contracts until contracts are “battle tested” and community is ready to takeover. The owner of the pool will be changed to the Balancer recommended address 0xbalbalbalbalbalbalbalbalbalbalbalbalbalb once the pool has been running for sometime without issue to allow for quick response time in the event of an emergency. Until then the Xave operations multisig will be assigned as the pool’s owner.

  5. Market History:
    GBPT is an asset backed stablecoin, fully collateralized and issued by BlackFridge - the licensed issuer of fiat backed stablecoin GBPT. USDC is an asset backed stablecoin issued by Circle

  6. Value:
    FXPools deployed on Xave are highly capital efficient allowing for the pool to support larger trade volumes despite the minimal liquidity.

Specification:

The Balancer Maxi LM Multisig eth:0xc38c5f97B34E175FFd35407fc91a937300E33860 will interact with the GaugeAdderv4 at 0x5DbAd78818D4c8958EfF2d5b95b28385A22113Cd and call the addGauge function with the following arguments:
gauge(address):0xc5e66bB9fE27b7Cef4B64557Ad8398437730DD33
gaugeType(string): Ethereum

https://snapshot.org/#/balancer.eth/proposal/0x8e1e78461b9ba5681eb98f5d68fba19eaf3f63cf2f860492efc172e279f26559

Really exciting to see more Xave/Balancer product collaboration happening, congrats! The rounding out of FX liquidity infrastructure across multiple chains sets the stage for some really interesting cross-chain swap and stablecoin flywheel use cases.

Question: What criteria was examined for GBPT:USDC to reach consensus for a 2% cap on BAL emissions? For reference on planning investment strategies, can the Balancer community expect that particular cap (or criteria) to apply as an approximate framework for future FX pools? Just wondering since the Avalanche pools haven’t been assigned a gauge.

Cheers to both teams for building and ongoing innovation!

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