BLabs Community Update // July 23, 2021

Smart Contract & Integrations

Building [on] a secure & flexible protocol

Stable Pools + Meta Stable Pools
Stable Pools

Meta Stable Pools
What are Meta Stable Pools? These are pools that are ideal for highly correlated (but not necessarily hard-pegged) tokens. One of the most powerful features of Meta Pools is that they can hold Pool Tokens and facilitate easy swaps of tokens in the underlying pools. Some example pools and their use cases are:

  • {Balancer USD Stable Pool BPT & Balancer EUR Stable Pool BPT}
    • Easily swap between underlying pool tokens
      • DAI and EURS
      • PAR and USDC
      • etc
  • {Balancer USD Stable Pool BPT & NewUsdToken}
    • Swap between any of the underlying stablecoins (DAI, USDC, USDT) and NewUsdToken
  • {DAI & cDAI}
    • Swap directly between correlated tokens

Status: Testnet deployment upcoming after minor technical detail is fixed. Then further testing + internal audit.

Upcoming: This is blocking for Lido’s Pool (wstETH/WETH); it will be among the first pools launched for this.

Note: MetaStable pools do not require UI updates, but the Batch Relayer would need a signature interface. Could possibly add this to the trade preview modal. Ideally Meta Stable Pools and Batch Relayer would launch simultaneously, but Certora is auditing the BR contract and could be an external delay.

Liquidity Bootstrapping Pools
Contracts are live! There are a few potential users on Polygon. Usage may grow organically prior to UIs.

What needs to happen for full LBP launch?

  • Subgraph and Smart Order Router
    • Should be completed soon
  • Developer Tools
    • Balpy
      • LBP creation live in most recent release
      • Todo: additional LBP functions (like weight shifting)
    • Balancer.js
      • Todo
  • UI
    • External teams (Copper, PrimeDAO) may not launch when we do. UI doesn’t need to do anything, but might want to.
      • “This pair is undergoing a weight shift right now”
      • Suggest higher slippage tolerance?

Status: Targeting 1 month if reviews go well and UI teams don’t have extra needs

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:

  • Polygon
    • Launched and going well
  • Arbitrum
    • Outstanding tasks
      • Multisig
        • Deployed! Test transaction was successful
      • Contracts
        • Small amount of prep for deployment needed
      • UI
        • Hopefully only minor changes
      • They’re not providing a firm launch date
        • They had previously said w/in 2wks in June

Staking Contracts
Claiming LP rewards is currently a clunky experience. With Staking Contracts, LP rewards can 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.

Pending tasks:

  • Internal audit
  • External audits
  • UI needs depend on what approach the contracts take

Status: Targeting 1-3 months

Migration Contracts
Proposed Additions:

  • Balancer → Balancer
    • Something like “You could be getting LM on PoolXYZ in V2 if you migrate, click here”
  • External Protocols
    • Make migration easier. One click to go from XYZ external pool to BalancerPoolABC
    • Benefit is to the user if there’s fluid movement

Status: Idea + discussion phase; no release date set

Asset Manager Pools and Linear Pools
Linear Pools 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:

  • Continued research on Linear Pools.
  • Have made decision not to deploy AMs in the near future.
  • 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

Front-end & Design
Making the Balancer protocol easy to use

Notification system
We were using BlockNative previously, but we’ve put in a new system for Gnosis. Moving to testing soon.

Subgraph improvements
Working to capture snapshots of daily stats for charts

Token Registry refactor
Token lists slow things down, so this is quite important.

Upcoming Tasks:

  • New investment/withdrawal flow
  • Migration tools
  • Explore improving trade UI
  • Pool creation UI has finally made an appearance on the UI roadmap! Exact timeline TBD

Gnosis Solver
This integration will use the Gnosis Solver (CowSwap) for the trade interface. The goal is to offer lower fees to improve the trading experience. This is a major endeavor. Testing coming soon

Ecosystem Team
Creating an enduring Ecosystem

Community
Goal: Increase engagement

  • Improve Communication
    • Introduced new Discord channels to facilitate discussions and improve transparency
      • #:heartbeat:heartbeat
      • #:thought_balloon:incentives-submissions-and-ideas
      • #:mortar_board:fund-committee
      • #whats-next-for-protocol
    • Very productive technical AMA, will be held monthly
    • Launch Frontend updates space on balancer.community
  • Improve Breadth
    • APAC engagement: kickoff call this Friday, we have a strong group of volunteers and leadership from Long Hash Ventures
    • Look into improving Balancer.fi translation
    • Polygon FAQs
  • Improve Depth (Ballers)
    • Increasing number of contributors
    • Grants committee is growing and close to finalizing the process
    • WIP - more bounties to be defined.

Marketing
Goal: Improve the awareness of Balancer’s brand

  • Product & Partnership Marketing is going well - up next is MetaStable Pools announcement
  • ROI mechanism and analytics
  • Branding is being shifted as a lower priority for two reasons: with the volume of weekly/bi-weekly product releases and the growing need to build out a ROI mechanism for campaigns and sponsorships.
  • Spacing out our major launches. Make a splash but don’t oversaturate
    • Flow
      • Technical (SC): Will be production ready on XYZ date
      • Technical (UI) : Determine frontend production ready date (if necessary)
      • PR: How much of a splash do we want this to make?
        • Balance w/ other launches
        • Coordinate with partners if applicable
    • Upcoming dates
      • Out of out control
        • Coinbase Earn just launched! July 23
        • Arbitrum (?)
        • Batch Relayer (depends on Certora)
      • In our control
        • Meta Stable Pools
        • LBPs
        • Gnosis
5 Likes

Question on the meta stable pools - will this functionality extend beyond stable pools to any kind of meta pool? For example, say we incentivize a huge WBTC/WETH/3poolBPT “base” pool. Can I create a YFI/“base pool” BPT and swap between YFI <> USDC?

Fernando mentioned instead of putting USDC or DAI in pools, we just put 3pool BPT which will concentrate all stablecoin liquidity in one pool, allowing for more competitive swaps with less liquidity fragmentation. Could we apply the same idea with a base pool BPT and concentrate all ETH liquidity in the base pool?

1 Like

@DavisRamsey apologies in advance that this answer might seem like it’s splitting hairs.

That wouldn’t be the MetaStable Pool itself, but the Batch Relayer. The MetaStable Pool is “just” for tokens that have highly correlated but slowly diverging tokens. It just so happens that one of the most powerful use cases for this involves pool tokens.

The Batch Relayer is what combines liquidity operations (add/remove) with swaps. The initial version of the BR will likely allow for going one pool deep, but future versions could extend that. So the WBTC/WETH/StaBAL3-USD pool could swap between WBTC, WETH, DAI, USDC, USDT, but I think it would need to be a future iteration to facilitate the two-level swap from YFI <> USDC like you asked about above

1 Like

Ah gotcha, makes more sense now.

I’ll definitely experiment with this on my own once it’s released. I think it opens up a lot more possibilities for us, especially around better index creation.

1 Like