FAQ
Why a grant in $BAL?
We like to think of the DAO’s non-circulating $BAL as its untapped potential. It is the last bit of $BAL that it was never able to materialise into contributions, liquidity, partnerships, etc. We therefore thought it to be fitting to propose to grant exactly this $BAL to act as the pre-seed for the fork. Balancer considers winding down, and in the process uses its unconsumed reserves to start anew.
How would it affect NAV?
The effects this grant would have on the treasury’s NAV could only be positive; it is a liability on its balance sheet less and 10% of the fork’s value is pre-allocated to the Balancer treasury. However, some of the grant would find its way into circulation, somewhat reducing the NAV per share. @rebelhermits’s rough percentage looks correct (1-(74.602m/(74.602m-6m))), meaning the old NAV of $0.1487 would go to $0.1368, just a bit more than a cent. Ultimately, the question to consider is, is up to 8.7% of the supply today worth more or less than 10% of the fork?
Relation to Wind-down
After talking to the directors in charge of the potential wind-down, we have learned that the rough costs for keeping pools unpaused are around $5k per month (API, hosting, maintenance). This is likely covered by any revenue that keeps flowing in due to the pools still being in production. In any case, the $220k buffer in the wind-down budget will be able to cover any of these additional expenses.
Tetu
Our understanding is that Marcus’ proposal already earmarked some non-circulating $BAL supply to the tetuBAL locker. When writing our proposal, we did not realize that there might not be enough non-circulating supply to cover both tetuBAL and our grant. Therefore, we propose to receive only half of the grant upfront, and the remainder (meaning up to 6m $BAL in total) after tetuBAL holders have been paid out.
Intellectual Property
For our purposes, the IP licenses we mention relate to the codebase, not necessarily Balancer’s trademark(s). Just to be clear; the fork would have nothing with the $BAL token, carry a new name and new logo, all falling under a new entity.