[BIP-XXX] Enable NFTE / wsteth-Boosted Aave v3 WETH-BPT Gauge (Arbitrum)

BAL Gauges
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PR with Payload: BIP-XXX: Enable NFTE / wsteth-Boosted Aave v3 WETH-BPT Gauge (Arbitrum) by westonnelson · Pull Request #319 · BalancerMaxis/multisig-ops · GitHub

Authors: NFTEarth Team

Summary:

This proposal is to add a veBAL gauge for the new NFTE / wsteth-Boosted Aave v3 WETH-BPT pool on Arbitrum.

Protocol Description:

NFTEarth is a community of NFT enthusiasts organized as a DAO and started operations in January of this year. With an emphasis on decentralization, Layer2 scaling networks, and open-source software, the DAO plans to grow the NFTfi space in a meaningful way on Arbitrum. Establishing deep liquidity is a key factor for this to happen. NFTEarth has created a ve8020 implementation on Arbitrum based on the Balancer veBAL 80/20 model as the team believes it is the best form of ve model adaptation that exists.

Motivation:

This proposal aims to add a veBAL gauge for the Enable NFTE / wsteth-Boosted Aave v3 WETH-BPT pools. NFTEarth has not yet been a part of the veBAL gauge system and this proposal aims to build on the Arbitrum growth and the potential for NFTfi and LSDfi enabled through both NFTEarth and Balancer.

Platform BAL incentives would also help deepen NFTE liquidity as we seek to further grow liquidity. If approved, we intend to coordinate with bribing platforms to incentivize the Balancer bribe market and continue to drive that narrative, as well as use the adoption of the ve8020 model in all the project marketing to help spread awareness of this initiative.

The NFTEarth Team plans to continue being a major adopter of Balancer tech and bribe incentivizer for BAL emissions to help grow and deepen our liquidity pool. Once this unique pool (being it is a Balancer boosted 80/20 of [Token,CSP-BPT] is whitelisted for BAL rewards, we would plan to use bribe incentives to promote trading, and LP farming activity on Balancer.

Governance:

NFTEarth is governed by it’s token holders and maintain a Snapshot Space at Snapshot

Market History:

NFTEarth DAO launched in January of 2023 with the aim of creating novel NFTfi and NFT use cases on Layer2 networks. The team has shipped multiple apps to date and has was selected by Google Cloud Platform as one of the Web3 Startup Program participants to help bootstrap protocol growth.

Risk Factors Regarding NFTE:

The NFTEarth protocol has been formally reviewed by WhiteHatDAO and achieved a solid security review which can be see here:

The team has its primary DAO Multisig on Arbitrum which is a 3/7 Multisig - this set up was chosen based on following best practices of other leading DAOs in the space place to mitigate risk. Also important to note that this was changed from what was originally a 2/5 to Multisig to 3/7 based on community feedback already - although this was done out of caution and not in response to any vulnerability or security risk exploited, there have been 0 instances of any unauthorized access or exploits of any sort to this date.

There are no extra permissions that exist in the current structure of the NFTEarth DAO / NFTE token for any user; the token was originally minted in February of 2023 on Ethereum Mainnet with a hardcapped supply of 100,000,000 NFTE tokens (Mainnet being used with the the goal of having Ethereum being the default implementation for the token contract from a security perspective) - and has since been bridged to 4 other networks: Arbitrum, Optimism, Polygon POS and Polygon zkEVM, although ~95% of the entire token supply now remains on Arbitrum and Optimism. All this can be viewed on each networks respective block explorers and also the team has been in communication with both both CoinGecko and CoinMarketCap to get the token added to their official Tokenlists, and the token has also been Whitelisted on both SushiSwap (Arbitrum) and Zerion (Multi-Chain) Token Lists in addition to Balancer (Arbitrum). The contract address for the official NFTE token implementation on Ethereum Mainnet is 0x0f9b80fc3c8b9123d0aef43df58ebdbc034a8901 and is fully verified on Etherscan and all contract details can be viewed at the link provided. The token contract has also been uploaded and verified to sourcify.eth and can be viewed at the link provided - the entire repository can be viewed from this link and also viewed in a browser based IDE such as Remix from this link as well. The NFT Marketplace currently uses Reservoir (https://reservoir.tools) under the hood, which is using the OpenSea Seaport contract.

NFTEarth is not a development shop and so has intentionally aimed as best as possible to use already written and audited code such as the NFT drops we have done using Thirdweb being a good example. The final item to mention in risk factors is that NFTEarth as a protocol was selected as one of the Google Cloud for Startups Web3 Accelerator participants after applying to the program. The team has already received grants from Google in the form of Cloud Credits to help build out the desired cloud infrastructure on GCP and has been working with a dedicated Account Manager and Technical Account Manager to build and implement the protocol vision. As part of this program of startups, the team gets access to a NFT token gated Discord community using an NFT you can view on OpenSea. You can actually verify the NFTEarth NFT here if you would like to at the OpenSea Link provided below. Screencaps are attached here of several of these items for convenience as well.

RELEVANT LINKS TO THE 5 AFORMENTIONED RISK FACTOR ITEMS:

  1. CoinGecko
  2. CoinMarketCap
  3. NFTE on Sourcify
  4. Etherscan
  5. NFTEarth GCP for Startups NFT on OpenSea
  1. CoinGecko
  1. CoinMarketCap
  1. NFTE on Sourcify
  1. Etherscan
  1. NFTEarth GCP for Startups NFT on OpenSea

SCREENCAPS OF 4 RELEVANT AFOREMENTIONED RISK FACTORS:

  1. WhiteHatDAO Safety Rating
  2. Etherscan view of NFTE contract and holders (Arbitrum and Optimism bridges being the largest balances of tokens)
  3. Sourcify.eth NFTE Token Contract
  4. NFTEarth GCP NFT

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References/Additional links:

Website: NFTEarth
Staking App: NFTEarth
Raffle App: NFTEarth
Documentation: About NFTEarth
Github: NFTEarth
Community: Discord
Twitter: NFTEarth

Arbitrum Pool Information:

NFTE / wsteth-Boosted Aave v3 WETH-BPT

Multisig Implementation

Pool deployed: 0xD0dC20e6342DB2dE82692B8Dc842301ff9121805

Gauge deployed: 0xd8699C91E6A4Ca2Dd819607C0ae93264FB2a441d

The Balancer Maxi LM Multisig eth:0xc38c5f97B34E175FFd35407fc91a937300E33860 will interact with the GaugeAdderv4 at 0x5DbAd78818D4c8958EfF2d5b95b28385A22113Cd and call the addGauge function with the following arguments:

Uncapped Gauge:
gauge(address): 0xd8699C91E6A4Ca2Dd819607C0ae93264FB2a441d
gaugeType(string): Arbitrum

1 Like
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Thanks for the proposal and great that you directly created a PR with a payload. Could you please be careful with assigning BIP numbers? Usually we Maxis make sure votes go to snapshot according to guidelines and before that BIPs stay in „BIP-XXX“ status

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Got it - yes! Apologies on the confusion there! Was trying to make it as simple as I could on your end and couldn’t find where the precise most recent # was! But this explains it then… would you like me to update anything here at the moment?

Ty! -Weston

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I am very suspicious of this proposal for several reasons.

I see the call is for an uncapped gauge? What would you be using as voting incentives? Looking at the chart of the NFTe token, I would assume it could not be with that token?

That chart is especially painful for me as a participant in the NFTe vested “presale”. The wound was created after a series of very interesting transactions took place on chain that seemed to indicate the NFTe team were doing similar questionable things as their affiliates and “advisors” at L2DAO however the teams appeared nearly indistinguishable. The situation created quite a commotion over in the OP governance token house forum. There was so much activity surrounding the questionable events in both the discord channels and several forum posts, a complete investigative report was created, to which NFTe did respond.

…there are several more yet less comprehensive threads on this topic.

LFGrow which is an extension of NFTe in sorts, ended up with 27,500 OP tokens that were originally from OP grant funds. Some time ago those tokens were spent for nothing to show. When asked about this, I believe Weston’s official response was something along the lines that the accusation levied against them somehow hindered them from shipping product. I don’t see how this is logical and justifies the tokens being expended but last time I checked LFGrow is still a 404 website and essentially vaporware.

The wound was made deeper when I investigated the NFTe docs and found nothing referencing the tokenomics. One had to scour their discord to find an image of the tokenomics breakdown and on it was absolutely NO allocation for a vested “presale.” 50k usd value was raised from a single community alone, idk how much more they raised elsewhere, but the situation seems similar to LFGrow and all those vested tokens are essentially worthless now. This “presale” seemed rather shady to me at best and I felt I was duped.

The whole incident later followed them over to Arbitrum governance discussions asking for NFTe to be excluded from the airdrops. There was always focus on ambiguity with the Msigs and who the actual signers were, some possibly being repeat signers. Im not here to hash that all up again and anyone interested can go read all of these things however I noticed one commenter who I do not recognize (probably duped from another community) as saying they are also an investor. More importantly, they pointed out some very interesting bridging and swapping performed by NFTe team.

This was all very intriguing as I started to investigate the NFTe arbitrum Msig. Not only does it sit at a minority 3/7, but I noticed two things. The first being that none of those signer wallets are claimed in the NFTe docs. We don’t know who the signers are. The second being that one of the signer wallets was participating in some further interesting trading strategies perhaps similar to what that user in the Arbitrum forum had pointed out. This was the use of single side depositing into uni V3, swapping around on uniV3 and other DEXs, then withdrawing from uni V3 and repeating. This is something I have seen many times before, it certainly raises some questions when examining the token flows, and it never looks above board imo.

If I recall correctly, it was these specific incidents that led to the Ramses team asking for NFTe to give back the partner veNFT they were granted. If memory serves me correctly, the veNFT was indeed returned.

I recall even further back that NFTe was trying to start a pool on OP over at BeetX. Again if memory serves me correctly, there were some single side deposits into that pool by the NFTe team, using NFTe tokens which was affectively selling them. The response to this was purely, they didn’t know that’s how it worked. Then after that…the pool was pretty much dead.

I am torn here. I would like to support all my fellow baggies who are down big on NFTe from that questionable “presale”. However I do not want that to happen at the expense of the Balancer user base.

We have seen other projects on Arbitrum and other chains, several of them recently, do exactly what NFTe was doing on Ramses. Providing large incentives with printed tokens, and then soon after, “interesting” transactions take place and well, one can look at the liquidity depth of those pairs on DexScreener.

I feel I was duped, I feel communities were duped, I feel Ramses’ users were duped, I feel like there was an attempt to dupe Beetx users, and I do not want the Balancer users to be duped.

Perhaps disclosure of the Msig signers with an increase to 4/7 followed by the allowance of a capped gauge would be more appropriate to generate some track record and data that can be used as KPIs. Once there is more data available and the team starts delivering on returning value to the project and token, a discussion could then take place to allow an uncapped gauge. Considering the history of this project and token, I think that would be reasonable to all parties involved.

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Thanks for the comments @SunFire … happy to address these all. First thing I’d mention is the team is sinply looking to build liquidity on Arbitrum and believes the ve8020 model is the best approach to bootstrapping liquidity.

As for the commotion or drama you mention from several months ago; this was all responded to, resolved, and concluded with exactly nothing more than with what it began with - nothing aside from FUD and accusations, not uncommon in crypto from competing platforms. It’s all documented and available for anyone to peruse if so inclined.

Regarding the Ramses veNFT you mention; the NFTE team was verbally told a veNFT would be given to them to use on Ramses - but this never actually occurred - It did not happen; so there was nothing to send back as you mention here. Not receiving the veNFT was a big obstacle in building liquidity - not sure if you were aware of this, but hope this helps clear up any confusion there.

Looking to spread awareness of tbe ve8020 model is something that could provide a big boost in awareness for the Balancer initiative so if you are indeed supportive of NFTE gaining traction I’d hope you could see how this could be a net positive on many fronts.

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This piece of shit is the biggest scammer in crypto. DO NOT give him any money.

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This scamming shit stole $15,000 FROM ME WHEN HE RUGGED THE NFTE LP FROM TEAM CONTROLLED WALLETS

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Do not think the ecosystem can move forward with this at this time. The pairing with a composable stable pool (wsteth/bbaweth) is currently crippled by recovery mode and a potential bug. This means wsteth/bbaweth liquidity will be migrated to a new pool and contract likely in the coming weeks. Will have to pause anything like this until then, and create a new pool if the consensus is to move forward with incentivizing NFTE liquidity. Please be cautioned as to not use this for your ve80/20.

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Has any of this been audited or reviewed by third parties? Do you have any links to that?

I don’t see a risks section here, nor any external review of the code. Further, a number of community members are bringing up concerns about risk, which you are promising away without any external validation.

Please add a risks section and include links to any external audits/reviews you have done and/or other ways that it can be independently verified that this project is somewhat legit/follows best practices for security. (or at least whatever you have).

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I believe this makes sense:

Other things:

Most links are broken (typos and other stuff).
The centralization analysis on the protocol (multisign, etc) is missing
I believe that the project/token isn’t eligible to an uncapped gauge under the current framework

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@ZenDragon - TY TY TY…! This is such critical information that, AFAIK, no one from the team has been made aware of yet - so just wanted to say thank you SO much for the heads up on this; this helps to avert what could have been a major disaster - will reevaluate best options then with this in mind! -Weston

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I’d suggest waiting until next week. There should be more feedback about how to proceed with boosted pool creation in the ecosystem.

1 Like