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).