Aug 4, 2021
Smart Contract & Integrations
Building [on] a secure & flexible protocol
MetaStable Pools
What are MetaStable Pools?
MetaStable Pools are ideal for highly correlated, but not necessarily hard-pegged, tokens. One of the most powerful use cases for MetaStable Pools is that when they hold Balancer Pool Tokens, they can facilitate easy swaps between tokens they hold and tokens in the underlying pool. A MetaStable Pool with StaBAL3-USD and NewUsdStable tokens could be used to swap between NewUsdStable and any of the nested StaBAL3-USD tokens (DAI, USDC, USDT). Another example is the pool Lido is launching for WETH & wstETH. This is a great use case for MetaStable Pools since it allows swaps directly between correlated but gradually diverging tokens.
Status: Launch expected in the next few weeks
Batch Relayer
MetaStable Pool timeline may allow for time to have the Batch Relayer ready at the same time. The Batch Relayer facilitates combining swaps with liquidity actions (add/remove). Will require some SOR and UI work to incorporate this.
Liquidity Bootstrapping Pools
LBPs feature weight shifting mechanisms which are ideal for launching tokens with little or no liquidity. They are also useful for facilitating large volume swaps over time.
Status: Subgraph and SOR are incorporating LBPs. Balpy already has LBP creation but needs additional functionality for them to be fully useful. External teams are working on UIs. A few potential LBP users on Polygon; may grow organically prior to UIs.
Oracles
Feedback from partners suggests some improvements to our oracles (for Weighted and Metastable Pools - or anything that uses PoolPriceOracle), which are under active development. We’re considering further changes to make it maximally flexible: variable buffer size and sample duration.
Sidechains & L2
Retail traction on L2 is picking up across the industry. Near-zero fees make hopping across multiple pools more feasible at scale. Users can invest in a larger variety of pools without creating fragmentation risk.
Status: No major updates. Arbitrum contracts are ready to be deployed but currently on the backburner given other priorities. Polygon is going well.
Staking Contracts
Claiming LP rewards is currently a clunky experience. With Staking Contracts, LP rewards will be calculated in real-time. This opens up interesting possibilities for LP rewards such as: auto-staking, one-click claim/reinvest, and external airdrops to Balancer Pools.
How do these work?
Users will stake BPT from eligible pools. UI: each eligible pool will have stake/unstake options. Distribution amounts will be streaming by block. Would be nice to have the ability to add liquidity straight to a staked BPT. Ability to stake multiple things at once, unstake multiple things at once.
Status: Continue to target 1-3 months
Linear Pools
Linear Pool could solve some of the potential issues with AMs in their current form. Might be best to use AMs for permissioned systems like Investments Pools that have admin-like management. There were some issues discovered with possible attack vectors.
Status: Long term research area
- Continued research on AM and Linear Pools
- Linear pools will likely fill the initial role we had imagined for AMs. We’re not 100% confident we understand them completely, but it is looking promising.
- No release date set
Migration Contracts
We’re going to fall behind if we don’t have migration tools in place. The easier it is to get liquidity, the better off TVL will be.
- From V1 to V2
- From other protocols to V2
Status: Discussion stage. Could be a good candidate for a grant/bounty.
Front-end & Design
Making the Balancer protocol easy to use
Recent developments
- Page refresh persistence merged w/ Develop branch
- Transaction speedups + calculations
- Liquidity Mining page merged w/ develop
- Token registry refactor
Upcoming
- Subgraph improvements
- Capture snapshots of daily stats for charts. In progress
- Gnosis Solver
- Progressing well, and is almost ready for testing. Haven’t yet integrated Balancer pools natively, just the 50/50 pools. Shouldn’t launch this until they support all of our pool types.
