The Balancer Maxis are assisting DAO participants in deploying pools and gauges, monitoring and funding various mission-critical components such as transmitting BAL rewards to gauges across deployments. Given the uptick in average gas costs in recent days, we have identified that the currently allocated budget will not be sufficient to continue operations until the end of March. Therefore, the Maxis are asking for 50 ETH to fund operations for the upcoming months.
Motivation
The Maxis are responsible for various operational tasks across the DAO such as pool deployments, gauge creations and funding of our OZ defender infrastructure and distribution of voting incentives. These involve spending ETH to fund these operations. We have built a monitoring dashboard visualizing our gas spending over time: https://dune.com/scoffie/advancedmaxigasstation
As of the writing of this proposal, the gas station is running low on ETH, currently sitting at 1.8 ETH. Additionally, the Maxi Ops wallet 0x166f54F44F271407f24AA1BE415a730035637325 currently holds 2 ETH. Given the gas station is responsible to fund various critical components such as the BAL reward distributors across networks, these funds will likely not last until the end of March. In the past, Maxis requested approximately 20 ETH per quarter to fund these operations. Based on these metrics we ask for an additional 50 ETH that shall be spent over the next 5-6 months depending on network activity. Maxis will make sure to execute most transactions at the lowest possible fee rates. The funds will then be managed by the Maxi operations wallet to periodically fund the gas station when needed.
Specification
The DAO Multisig 0x10A19e7eE7d7F8a52822f6817de8ea18204F2e4f will transfer 50 ETH to the Maxis Multisig address as the recipient 0x166f54F44F271407f24AA1BE415a730035637325.
As of the writing of this post, the mainnet gas station now holds 2.76 ETH parts of which will likely be used in the next checkpointing / BAL distribution by OZ defender.
Therefore, this is a timely proposal to make sure on-chain operations continue without any disruption.
Finally, the Maxis will evaluate all related infrastructure (e.g. OZ defender, fee distributions, gauge injectors) and design solutions to optimize gas usage wherever possible, likely as part of the Maxi Q2 initiatives.
After completion of the migration of automation events to OZ Defender v2, we will modify the codebase to save gas on weekly runs to send BAL to target chains. We identified the biggest savings potential there
We will optimize which tasks run with OZ Defender and Chainlink automation to reduce overall operational costs (what should execute on events and what should execute on schedules).
Additional measures can be taken in placing voting incentives to reduce gas costs. Maxis ususally execute those at the lowest possible gas cost time-windows during weekends
Outlook
Based on the current setup, gas spendings should last another 6-8 months. In the upcoming weeks Maxis will dedicate resources to address big gas spending tasks which should result in further gas spendings optimizations.
We want to give a short update on gas spendings. Overall gas usage has decreased significantly. Mostly attributed to more efficient usage of our OZ defender infrastructure but also because of lower overall gas prices.
Gas spendings were generally significantly lower compared to previous months. The increase in demand was mostly attributed to sending ETH to deployer addresses, as we onboarded more contributors to the gas station. Although the ETH is gone from the gas station, deployers haven’t used much of these funds.
Breakdown by target:
Target
Amount (ETH)
OZ Defender
4.17 ETH
Deployer
3.86 ETH
Multi-sigs
0.713 ETH
In total we have spent 8.74 ETH of which most is still idle in deployer wallets. You can check our deployer registry which hold more than 6 ETH combined as of the writing of this update.
Next Steps and Outlook
The Maxis multi-sig still holds 26.99 ETH that is intended to top up the gas station. Based on the last 4 months of operations and more stable gas usage, we anticipate that these funds will last another 6 months with the current infrastructure in place.
Thanks to our checkpointer optimizations and overall lower gas regime, we were able to reduce costs significantly. Given the recent uptick in gas and low funding state of the mainnet Gas sation, we just executed a refill of 10 ETH
