[BIP-751] Fund the DAO Gas Station Operations for 2025

PR with Payload

Summary

In February 2024, the Maxis requested 50 ETH of various mission critical components to secure operations of Balancer DAO on-chain infrastructure. As this funding is close to getting depleted, we are requesting another 50 ETH to fund at least another year of on-chain operations.

Motivation

The DAO is responsible for various on-chain automation tasks such as

  • Gauge checkpointing
  • BAL reward checkpointing and distribution across chains through Open Zeppelin automation
  • Deployment of pools or other smart contracts through deployers
  • Funding and upkeep of reward injector infrastructure (both v1 and v2)

The Maxis have optimized the gas usage of BAL reward checkpointing but given the recent uptick in gas costs we are running low again on ETH funding and are therefore requesting another 50 ETH to fund operations for at least another year.

Accounting Breakdown for 2024 Operations

To provide an overview of how the DAO spent the 50 ETH until January 5th 2025, we can consult our gas station dashboard and do following accounting overview:

Target Amount (ETH)
Automation Relayers 11.46
Deployers / EOAs / Upkeeper funding (LINK) 30.58
Maxi Ops Wallet 6.99
Current Gas Station Balance 7.586

From March 2024 to Jan 6, 2025, the Maxis transferred a total of 45 ETH to the gas station from the Maxi Operations safe (as confirmed by this dune query for funding and this query for transfers out). Therefore, the Maxi Ops safe will transfer another 5 ETH to the gas station to complete funding for this cycle.

Specification

As the gas station has been operational for more than 2 years with several DAOs, we now propose to transfer the ETH directly to the gas station instead of a SP controlled safe, so that operational costs are handled non-custodial via this contract and accounting can be performed based on the balance changes thereafter.

The DAO Multisig 0x10A19e7eE7d7F8a52822f6817de8ea18204F2e4f will first call withdraw on the WETH contract to unwrap 20 WETH to ETH (as the DAO currently only holds 32.52 ETH and 86.95 WETH) and will then transfer 50 ETH to the gas station address as the recipient 0x7fb8f5d04b521b6880158819e69538655aabd5c4 (verifiable here).

1 Like

Additional note: the Maxis decided to send the entire ETH stack left in the Maxi Ops wallet to the gas station (6.99 ETH instead of 5 ETH) via this bulk tx. The plan to fund the gas station with 50 ETH for 2025 remains he same.

https://snapshot.box/#/s:balancer.eth/proposal/0x9ce98920a42aea2ec2bbecaa84e1eaf2ce18e480896ba36ec505e0af2491dbc6