Overview
Balancer OpCo Limited (“OpCo”) is a wholly-owned operating subsidiary of the Balancer Foundation. It is an integral element of the Balancer Foundation corporate structure supporting the Balancer DAO. It serves two primary functions (a) Administrative and Operational; and (b) Product Development. This proposal deals with the Administrative and Operational (Admin & Ops) element of the OpCo.
Administrative & Operations
Serving as the operating entity with which third-party Service Providers to the Balancer DAO will contract, submit invoices to, and from which they will be paid whether that be in fiat or in tokens. This role is integral to the decentralized operations of the Balancer ecosystem. In practice, it helps the DAO achieve its goals, supporting the healthy long term functioning of the Balancer Protocol.
The Balancer OpCo will operate under the direction of the Balancer Foundation, which will oversee / have responsibility for governance, corporate administration and operations. This includes hosting and managing software subscriptions and login credentials for certain ecosystem-wide platforms and social media accounts. It also hosts an in-house counselor for Governance, Legal and Compliance (GRC) that serves the Ecosystem Council.
As a reminder, the Foundation and OpCo operate under the governance of the DAO. The community should expect to see on this budget a higher number overall, mainly due to the moving from other allocations in past epochs to this BIP: either because they are essential protocol infrastructure costs or ecosystem-wide costs, not related to a single service/entity.
Pledge to abide by [BIP-702] Balancer DAO Service Provider & Grantee Standards: Yes
Domains of Operation: Administrative and operational
Length of Engagement & Budget:
One year - July 2025 (Q3 FY25) through June 2025 (Q2 FY26) divided into four quarters.
The summary below reflects the proposed budget for these four quarters, to be sent in quarterly payments from the DAO. Updates on each epoch will be given according to DAO’s accountability guidelines. If budget changes are requested they will go to a snapshot vote. If no changes are requested, this proposal will serve as the governing decision. Any unspent amounts at the end of the period will either be returned to the Balancer Treasury, or offset against the next period’s funding proposal or other SPs.
The table below shows the applicable expense categories by quarter, followed by descriptions of their make-up.
Requests for USDC transfers:
We propose that 380,513 USDC funding for OpCo to be drawn from DAO Treasury (and/or KPK managed Treasury), which are estimated to cover the twelve months of the OpCo budget based on current information.
Note that previous savings have been applied in other funding proposals that did not require stablecoin transfers from the DAO multisig, such as [BIP-798] and [BIP-799].
Request for BAL transfer:
Additionally, OpCo requests 36,000 BAL to be allocated in Year 3 towards People Costs (Business and Community Service Providers) to fund Ballers and other user support groups via locked vesting contracts (auraBAL, sdBAL or veBAL), with no transfers being required at the moment.
Cost breakdown:
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Administrative costs (forecast at $184,950 annually) for the BVI structure of Registered Office/Agent, Registrar of Companies fees, annual compliance services, ongoing legal regulatory expenses (including establishment of new bank accounts, if needed), bank fees, gas fees, GRC services, bookkeeping and accounting services (see previous proposals for reference).
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Business and Community Service Providers Non-People Costs (forecast at $47,363 annually) consist in a set of software subscriptions and diverse service providers, currently being utilized by one or multiple DAO SPs for coordination, i.e. Google Workspace, Notion, Twitter, Slack etc.
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Business and Community Service Providers People Costs (Ballers) provide user support, organize irl events (ONsites), community safety against scams and attend to queries mainly through Discord. This is a lean group of 2.0 FTE (1FT+2PT), (estimated cost of $48,000 + 36,000 locked BAL).
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Network and Protocol Infrastructure services (forecast at 100,200 USD annually) came down quite a bit after the launch of v3, due to the teams actively searching for cost-effective alternatives whenever possible/available, with considerable saving in RPC provider and AWS storage.
In addition to infrastructure savings, we’ve removed the allocation for D&O Insurance. This decision was made because the proposals we received did not meet our expectations for reasonable carve-outs, leading us to rely on the DAO’s self-insurance fund. In comparison, last epoch the request was made for $552,168, covering basically the same outputs ([BIP-634]).
ETH Address to Receive Funds: 0x3B8910F378034FD6E103Df958863e5c684072693
Specifications
The Balancer DAO multisig 0x10A19e7eE7d7F8a52822f6817de8ea18204F2e4f will interact with USDC 0xA0b86991c6218b36c1d19D4a2e9Eb0cE3606eB48 by writing transfer passing the OpCo Multi-sig 0x3B8910F378034FD6E103Df958863e5c684072693 as recipient and amount as 372565 as 372565000000.
- Note the transfers can be made quarterly, and we trust the Maxis can work the payloads accordingly.