PR with Payload
Authors: @Xeonus @gosuto @ZenDragon, @Mike_B and @zekraken
TL;DR
- Renew the current bi-annual contract for another six months
- Deliverables focus on automation, security and white glove partner management
- With the departure of @lipman the Maxis will take over all BD efforts with @ZenDragon as new BD lead
- Reduced discretionary budget by two thirds
- Overall lower footprint on treasury (~$250k annually); both in terms of stablecoins and $BAL
Introduction
To streamline operations and solidify Balancer’s position as a leading DEX, we propose to further restructure our service portfolio into a specialized on-chain DevSecOps and partner management team. This strategic shift has not only enhanced efficiency but also significantly reduced operational costs over the last 6 months.
Building on this success, we are requesting an optimized funding package for Q2-Q3 2025 to continue delivering exceptional service and support, while showcasing Balancer’s commitment to innovation. This proposal requests funding the Balancer Maxis SP for the upcoming 6 months from Q2 to Q3 of 2025.
Initiatives
We propose to work on 3 key initiatives that fully align the DAOs goals of becoming an efficient, profitable, innovative and builder friendly DEX. Looking back at our previous funding proposal, we want to continue with improving on-chain automation and operations as we still see great potential in simplifying processes within the DAO. Additionally, partner management and advising product development go hand-in-hand as we are at the forefront of managing DAO interfacing requests and innovation. Based on these focus points, we propose following initiatives:
Initiative 1: On-chain Operations and Security Management (DevSecOps)
Co-Leads: @Xeonus & @gosuto
Team: jalbrekt
Summary
We have made significant improvements of on-chain operations, such as nearly hands-off automation of fee processing for Balancer v2, interruption free automation of BAL reward distribution as well as significantly simplifying the partner onboarding experience. We want to continue to improve and automate as many aspects of our infrastructure and fee processing as possible while also advising on on-chain security. The next natural iteration is the transformation from DevOps to DevSecOps with support from Hypernative and Balancer Labs:
- On-chain operations and monitoring
- Self-service modules and management (Ops UI)
- Automated Fee processing
- Treasury multi-sig management oversight and execution in collaboration with @kpk
- Leading of a newly formed security council of ecosystem participants
Objectives
- Manage and Operate Balancer deployments (v2 and v3) across chains
- Ensure that proxy infrastructure such as Chainlink automation works
- Modify and expand Openzeppelin functionality if BAL is launched on a new chain
- Manage and Operate on-chain permissions and protocol states
- Management and execution of operations permission BIPs
- Overseeing protocol health and
- Manage and Operate DAO wallets incl. Treasury assets in collaboration with karpatkey
- vlAURA token management and evaluation of potential migration to a dedicated safe wallet incl. Activation of the recently reviewed safe module to automate relocking (BIP-715)
- Advising on building and execution of payloads for buffer management for the Karpatkey managed positions
- Regular sync points and alignment with @kpk on treasury management and optimization, including but not limited to permission granting and security impact of DAO funds
- Building of automation to propose / transmit transactions directly to a Safe after a pull-request in our operations repository has been reviewed / approved and merged (pilot already in production with vlAURA voting)
- Secondary Reward Token Management and Distribution
- Operations UI
- Merkl rewards on v3
- Injector v2 infrastructure
- Maintenance and expansion of Operations UI functionality
- Improve our current partner onboarding experience
- Expand injector v2 infrastructure functionality
- Take learnings and further improve and expand components based on partner feedback
- Advise BLabs on any potential partner onboarding UI experience in the main app
- Oversight and advisory of the internal security committee council
- Overseeing chain state and management of the Emergency DAO multisig together with BLabs
- Liaison for on-chain security topics between Hypernative, BLabs and Maxis on-chain operations
- Monitoring and improvement of security measures to prevent malicious transaction execution on any of our multi-sigs
- Omni-chain operations: Chainlink Automation & Gas Stations
- Further optimize Chainlink upkeep monitoring and automate LINK top-ups as well as the design and development of backup systems
- Incorporate more monitoring solutions into the operations UI
- Establish omni-chain gas station contracts to feed all relevant dependencies with ETH (or chain gas tokens) and LINK (gas for automation jobs)
- Fee processing and distribution
- Own and execute on fee processing for all Balancer v3 deployments Balancer controls
- Oversee and execute on fee processing on Balancer v2, incl. Maintenance and improvements to our newly deployed protocol fee allocator v2 code-base (see GitHub repo)
Initiative 2: Growth
Co-Leads: @ZenDragon & @Mike_B
Team: @zekraken
Summary
The Balancer Maxis core focus has developed to include operational excellence, growth, and partner experience. As partners are onboarding into the Balancer ecosystem, the Maxis are tasked with streamlining the process and providing an enjoyable customer experience to retain as many users as possible. The end goal of the growth team is to simplify the process of onboarding and leveraging Balancer’s tech. We are dedicated to growing the product offerings Balancer has to meet market needs, communicating this to partners and the greater market, and finally utilizing these dominant products to grow the revenue and value proposition of the protocol.
Objectives:
- Growth of Balancer V3 over the next 6 months to attain at a minimum 300M USD in TVL. The current growth trajectory points towards higher expectations, but linearly 300M over 6 months represents the current growth pace. This goal sets a realistic target which the Balancer Service Providers will aim to fulfill. While not in ETH terms, our DAO costs are denominated in USDC primarily so for now TVL goals will be as well.
- Driving the DAO towards cash flow positive in terms of revenue taken to the DAO vs. costs of service providers. The DAO team composition is quite lean at this point, so our only option is to drive revenue into Balancer across the board to make this possible. Partnerships will do so via bringing in new business with the BDSP through structured configuration of pools, hooks, and incentive optimizations as needed.
- The definitive target is ⅓ of Balancer revenue or more to come from Balancer V3 by the end of this 6 month window. Due to large legacy pools such as Aave/wstETH and stickiness on V2, this is a fair target.
- Owning the market to product development feedback loop lands on partnerships to relay what products are needed in order to drive further growth. This is demonstrated by the StableSurge hook’s recent success and the ability to understand partner needs becoming a tangible solution which increases business outcomes.
- Over the next 6 months the goal is to have new unique products launched on Balancer V3 attain over 50M in TVL. Including hooks such as StableSurge, MEV Capture, and any new invariants built in house by the Balancer Labs team.
- In addition, at least one new product deployed must be credited to this feedback loop process and an article on the initial demand to the deployment and go to market will be presented in the last month of this engagement.
- Grow ecosystem and governance participation by onboarding 3 additional DAOs or entities to participate in the veBAL system at some capacity. This is to occur over the next 6 months and will include sparking renewed participation from any existing DAOs such as Gnosis or Aave. The goal is advancing the narrative around Balancer and aligning partners with the ecosystem.
- Streamlining and Transforming Partner Experience. In tandem with the above initiatives led by @Xeonus and @gosuto to automate processes regarding reward distribution, payload creation, reviews, and partners interacting with front-end tools the goal is to have as hands off a process from pool creation to gauge proposal as possible. Historically Balancer SP’s have provided a “white glove” onboarding service to partners, which will continue, but in a different capacity. The tools in place will be utilized for partners to handle the entire process of onboarding in the majority of new prospects. During this time the partner management team will continue to assist, and drive feedback to the DevOps team to reach the final form of a 100% partner owned onboarding experience.
- This applies to pool, gauge, and injector creation with only minor necessity for hook configuration, amplification parameter changers, add_reward, and injector assistance in the cases where only governance or the Maxis have the ability to change an outcome.
- Furthermore reducing rate provider review lead time to a 2 week maximum in even the busiest of times is an attainable goal by coordinating with partners, the internal priorities of Balancer Labs reviewers, and the expected expansions to new chains + new lending markets for boosted pools.
- Longer term additional items can be covered such as a more streamlined token whitelisting process, providing images for tokens where they don’t exist on coingecko, and management of metadata related to how pools display in the front end (ex. pool summary, pool naming, points system, etc.)
- Driving development on Balancer V3. Coordinate with external teams to drive development of innovative AMM based products on Balancer V3. This includes but is not limited to teams like QuantAMM, CoWAMM, Akronswap, EZKL, and others. In order to make Balancer V3 a thriving ecosystem of innovative AMM tech, we must seek out and work to build novel AMM innovation both internally and externally.
- Identifying promising AMM teams to join the Balancer ecosystem
- Assist with the development process, coordinate technical meetings, structure go to market strategies, and align on objectives.
- Over the next 6 months, launch at least 2 externally built AMMs on top of Balancer v3
- Brainstorm and execute on internally built innovations in the AMM space
- Readjusting CLAMM
- MEV capturing technologies
- Dynamic fee methodologies
- Oracle based AMMs
- Work with the integrations team to ensure trades route through innovative new pool types
- Expand pool offerings to cover a wider range of assets classes such as
- RWAs
- Volatile long and short tail pairs
- New token launches
The goal of the above initiatives is to expand Balancer V3 market share in the volatile asset market, of which we are currently underrepresented.
Initiative 3: Interfacing with Product Development
Co-Leads: @ZenDragon & @Xeonus
Team: @zekraken
Summary
The Balancer Maxis have the unique position to have direct interaction with strategic partners while also running protocol operations. Therefore, we want to leverage this position to aid BLabs in developing and improving our product suite. Additionally, we aim to experiment with tooling or pilot projects to showcase the power of Balancer v3. Our intention is to focus on 3-4 strategic objectives and report their outcome in our monthly updates
Objectives
- Integration and functional testing
- Partner with smart contracts team to perform user testing, provide feedback, and provide additional requirements if necessary during build phase
- Perform data analysis and make adjustment to parameters if necessary for new pool types or other new functionality such as hooks
- Build additional tooling such as the MEV arb bot which allows immediate trade flow through pools before aggregators and/or other bots can integrate. Also seek to bring additional volume to Balancer. Share and teach tooling to any partners if required.
- Analytics experience
- Interface with the OpCo design and BLabs data teams to build a native Zen UI analytics experience based on Dune and Subgraph data
- Advise the backend team how to integrate key metrics into api-v3
- veBAL experience
- The veBAL voting page has been the last component that needs to be migrated to the Zen UI. We will consult the front-end team in product development execution which includes: testing, optimizing and interfacing with voting incentive market providers, Testing and executing on new voting strategies incl. A veBAL multi-voter module similar to our DeFilytica prototype that has been in production for a while.
- Improve UX around veBAL management such as voting, veBAL power and vote delegation
- Hook ideation and execution
- @ZenDragon stable surge hook is already gaining a lot of positive traction for the protocol. We want to further explore hook ideas based on partner feedback and be involved in prototyping potential ideas with BLabs.
Service Provider Name & Overview: Balancer Maxis
Leader(s): Xeonus, joined by the talented, gosuto, Zen Dragon, Zekraken and jalbrekt
Contributors/Freelancers: -
**Pledge to abide by [[BIP-702]]([BIP-702] Balancer DAO Service Providers and Grantee Standards) Balancer DAO Service Provider & Grantee Standards**: Yes
Domains of Operation:
- Governance and Protocol Operations
- Partner Management and Business Development
- On-Chain Development, Security and Operations (DevSecOps)
- Pool Design and Ecosystem Coordination
- Data Analytics and Reporting
Key Objectives per Operational Discipline:
1. Governance and Protocol Operations
- Leading governance procedures, ensuring their execution and integrity.
- Facilitating technical discussions within governance scopes.
- Setting up governance votes and reviewing payloads for DAO transactions.
- Crafting detailed governance proposals and specifications.
- Offering deep technological insights during governance deliberations.
- Assisting in specifications to proposals for proper payload execution
- Infrastructure and tool creation for enhancing governance operations.
- Automating tasks, reducing human dependency in governance functions.
- Creating UI tools that support operational tasks (past examples: pool creation, reward injectors, linear pool deployment [deprecated])
2. Partner Management and Business Development
- Applying profound product and technical knowledge in strategic planning.
- Engaging with new partners and broader Web3 communities.
- Providing technical support and insights for strategic development.
- Assisting in custom pool creations and new chain launches.
- Managing revenue flows and direct incentives with partners.
- Facilitating discussions on financial incentives and revenue optimization.
- Acting as active partner support and assisting new partners navigate the ecosystem
3. On-Chain Development, Security and Operations (DevSecOps)
- Build, administer and operate governance associated change control processes surrounding on-chain treasury and protocol operations (if applicable)
- Overseeing DevSecOps and automating multisig operations.
- Building multisig payloads and conducting multi-person peer-reviews
- Guidance on infrastructure-related and operational aspects of the protocol and the DAO.
- Continued improvement, support and development of OpenZeppelin and Chainlink automation infrastructure
- Core development, aiding in automation and data management.
- Smart contract development(when needed) of helpers and tooling for partners.
- Support in technical best practices.
- Bi-weekly fees processing and reporting
- Grant program management and incentive distribution automation and handling.
- Overseeing Stipend Distribution Automation (where applicable)
- Advisors in on-chain security and emergency response procedures
- Leading of the DAOs Security Council
- Monitoring and improvement of security measures to prevent malicious transaction execution on any of our multi-sigs
4. Pool Design and Ecosystem Coordination
- Designing pools for the protocol, aligning with governance specifications.
- Liaising with the ecosystem for synchronized functionality and growth.
- Assistance in pool design and migration to v3
- Token whitelisting and front-end testing.
- Assisting in the technical aspects of pool and gauge creation.
- Testing of v3 front-end infrastructure
5. Data Analytics and Reporting
- Spearheading data analytics, offering valuable insights through reports and dashboards.
- Maintaining high-level expertise in protocol-related data.
- Advising @kpk in quarterly financial report creation
- Assisting in data handling, contributing to informed decision-making.
Reporting
We have been providing extensive reports on our work throughout the last funding round. Consult our monthly updates for progress here. To ensure full transparency on our working objectives, achievements and cost basis, we will update the ecosystem and community participants regularly through weekly meetings and monthly community reports:
Ecosystem Meetings
- Inform ecosystem participants of our weekly progress and planned activities
- Coordinate collaborations and issues with other ecosystem stakeholders
Monthly reports
- Write up detailed monthly reports on key objectives
- Provide a financial statement of the usage of discretionary funds as in previous funding rounds
Length of Engagement & Budget:
The Maxis have established a conservative and effective budgeting framework with a mix of fixed contributor salaries and flexible discretionary budgeting. Over the last year, Maxis have requested a large discretionary budget of $15k USDC a month. Based on our experience from the last 2 funding rounds, and our new team composition, we concluded that we will not need such high discretionary funds anymore. As a result, we will reduce the monthly ask of this position to $5k a month (from $15k a month).
Additionally, based on our conservative spending framework, we can carry over significant savings of 75,000USDC that will be deducted further reducing our overall funding request.
Given we are also taking over BD for the DAO our total FTEs will slightly increase from 5 to 5.25 while keeping the average cost basis per FTE roughly the same (see previous funding request).
A detailed breakdown of our funding request with cost breakdown is visualized below:
We are additionally asking for a BAL token grant of 37,500 BAL for the next half-year (at BAL price of $1.4). BAL will be locked for 1 year with a custom vesting contract.
Quarterly BAL allocation: $23,437 ( = 18,750 BAL)
In total our USDC and BAL cost basis breakdown looks as follows for 5.25 FTE:
| Position | Cost Basis |
|---|---|
| $ / FTE / month (USDC + BAL vest) | $13,571.4 |
| $ / FTE / month (USDC) | $11,904,7 |
| Discretionary monthly allocation | $5,000 |
Optimized cost footprint compared to previous funding proposals (Maxis & BDSP)
| Position | Maxis: Prev. Proposal | BDSP Prev. Proposal | Maxis: Actual proposal | Savings |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| People cost ($) | $334,500.00 | $72,000.00 | $375,000.00 | $31,500.00 |
| BAL Token Grant ($) | $61,874.82 | $12,000.00 | $52,500.00 | $21,374.82 |
| Discretionary | $90,000.00 | $0.00 | $30,000.00 | $60,000.00 |
This results in a total reduction of our bi-annual footprint by $112,874 or $225,749 annually attributed to a reduced head-count (for Maxis and BDSP combined) and reduced ask in discretionary funds.
With the additional savings of $75,000 from the last funding round we get a total of $300,749 in savings until end of Q3
Personnel Changes
With our new focus on on-chain operations, security, BD and partner management, we will further optimize our team-composition. As a result, @MikeB and @zekraken will aid @ZenDragon in BD efforts.@zekraken will increase his part-time contributor role to nearly full-time (0.75 FTE). Jalbrekt is now fully onboarded as a part-time contributor and signer and will continue to work as a part-time contributor. This new team composition will guarantee the most optimal cost basis and efficiency for the DAO in terms of Ops and BD deliverables.
Length of engagement: 6 months
Budget: 330,000 USDC and 37,500 BAL
ETH Address to Receive Funds: 0x166f54F44F271407f24AA1BE415a730035637325
Impact on the Treasury
The Treasury wallets currently approximately hold 3,392,654 BAL. Funding the Balancer Maxis for the next half year would impact 0.55% of the treasury’s BAL holdings, which annualizes to 1.11% of the treasury’s BAL. The Treasury wallets currently hold 4.804mln in stables (excluding stables in v3 buffers). Funding the USDC portion would cost around 3.43% of the treasury’s stable reserve, which annualizes to 13.7%.
Technical Specification
The Balancer DAO multisig 0x10A19e7eE7d7F8a52822f6817de8ea18204F2e4f will interact with USDC 0xA0b86991c6218b36c1d19D4a2e9Eb0cE3606eB48 by writing transfer passing the Maxi Safe 0x166f54F44F271407f24AA1BE415a730035637325 as recipient and amount 330000 USDC as 330000000000.
Furthermore the Balancer DAO multisig 0x10A19e7eE7d7F8a52822f6817de8ea18204F2e4f will interact with BAL 0xba100000625a3754423978a60c9317c58a424e3D by writing transfer passing the Maxi Safe 0x166f54F44F271407f24AA1BE415a730035637325 as recipient and amount 37500 as 37500000000000000000000.
Edits by Maxis:
- revised Ops and Growth Proposal