[BIP-5] Tribe DAO : Unclaimable BAL rewards

Hi everyone,

As most of you are aware, the Tribe DAO has applied for a veBAL allowlisting last month, that was granted by the Balancer DAO, and 112,041 B-80BAL-20WETH tokens were successfully locked into veBAL last month.

The Tribe DAO also owns 252,865 B-70WETH-30FEI BPTs, a pool token that has a gauge, and we staked the BPTs in the gauge, earning BAL for around 3 weeks.

Contract used for vote-locking and gauge staking :

During our periodic reward harvesting 2 weeks ago, we noticed that our contract could not claim the BAL rewards associated with gauge staking, only the BAL and bb-a-USD associated with veBAL holding.

After discussion with the Balancer team, the issue was identified : BAL is not distributed through the gauge system, but through a BalancerMinter contract that is connected to the gauge system. The Tribe devs did a mistake, as we wanted to re-use the voting escrow and gauge management contracts we used for Angle Protocol, but it turns out that Angle Protocol distributes their ANGLE differently, directly through the gauges and not through a minter (like Curve and Balancer), so we did not have any capability to interact with the BalancerMinter. We tested and successfully claimed empty rewards on the gauge without revert, but just assumed no BAL were distributed because the gauge weight of the FEI pool was zero.

The Tribe DAO’s vote-locker has been deployed as an immutable contract, and it is now impossible to add the capability to interact with the BalancerMinter and claim the BAL rewards associated with gauge-staked BPTs.

As a result, the Tribe DAO farmed 34,344 BAL that will be forever unclaimable on the BalancerMinter.

We would like to ask the Balancer DAO to OTC these BAL tokens back to us (on this address). We do realize that there is absolutely no obligation to do so on your part, and that the mistake was ours, but Balancer is a very strategic move for the Tribe DAO (even more so with the FEI<>FRAX partnership potentially coming), and these BAL will never enter circulation and will forever be unclaimable otherwise. The Tribe DAO will continue to renew its veBAL locking from the current contract, but we are going to deploy a new gauge staking contract shortly (edit - deployed here behind eip-1967 proxy).

4 Likes

I have to be against this unfortunately as I don’t think this is a proper use of Balancer’s treasury.

I am very bullish on the future collaboration between Balancer and Tribe - I recognize Tribe has been in a difficult spot lately and I think you’ve handled yourselves exceptionally well. Please don’t take my stance on this proposal to mean I don’t like Tribe or something along those lines - quite the opposite is true in fact, I really respect you all as real builders and visionaries in DeFi. This is just me having to put Balancer’s interests first, hopefully you can understand that :slight_smile:

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I don’t have any particular stance on this proposal but I just want to clarify that this BAL wouldn’t come from the Balancer treasury directly, i.e. us sending BAL which we currently hold in the DAO multisig.

As these funds are provably unclaimable we could deploy a contract which would mint exactly the amount which Fei would have received in the case where they could call mint() on the existing minter. We’d experience some inflation (but we expected this inflation to happen in the case where this issue never occurred) and the treasury would hold the same amount of BAL as it did before.

Perhaps I misunderstood what you wrote but I just wanted to clarify this for anyone else reading this proposal.

5 Likes

No, it seems it was my misunderstanding. I completely support doing what you outlined :slight_smile: Thanks for chiming in

3 Likes

Hi guys @TomFrench @solarcurve,

Seems like the initial idea of using Balancer’s treasury is not appealing, but that there is an acceptable solution requiring a small dev lift on your side, where new BAL could be minted with a new contract & the provably unmintable BAL can remain unminted.

Could we take this to snapshot vote, using the text from my original message above ?

TLDR, action to take: mint 34,344 BAL on 0xc5bb8F0253776beC6FF450c2B40f092f7e7f5b57 (balancerDepositFeiWeth)

Thanks for having thinked through possible solutions :slight_smile:

2 Likes

Specification from master Nico:

The DAO Multisig 0x10A19e7eE7d7F8a52822f6817de8ea18204F2e4f will initiate a transaction to the Authorizer 0xA331D84eC860Bf466b4CdCcFb4aC09a1B43F3aE6 calling grantRole with the arguments:

role: 0xdddd30813da50fda5faba482fd2937d0c6165d2faf027d3dfbd1554f3d7d47ff
account: 0x34ac9f7ebA9213C827fE5Abf5b09A16F4D0cC69b taken from here)

This is the permission to mint BAL.

A second transaction from the DAO Multisig 0x10A19e7eE7d7F8a52822f6817de8ea18204F2e4f would call performNextStage on 0x34ac9f7ebA9213C827fE5Abf5b09A16F4D0cC69b

1 Like

https://snapshot.org/#/balancer.eth/proposal/0x58e9a1c3bf455e5e8ac9a648fe58731572d0aa142a228031fbe5b096107e2754

1 Like