# BLabs x Community Update // September 22, 2021

**URL:** <https://forum.balancer.fi/t/blabs-x-community-update-september-22-2021/2230>\
**Category:** Community Updates\
**Created:** [September 22, 2021, 1:06pm UTC](https://forum.balancer.fi/t/blabs-x-community-update-september-22-2021/2230 "2021-09-22T13:06:24Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![gerg](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex027/user_avatar/forum.balancer.fi/gerg/32/200_2.png) [@gerg](https://forum.balancer.fi/u/gerg)\
**Post date:** [September 22, 2021, 1:06pm UTC](https://forum.balancer.fi/t/blabs-x-community-update-september-22-2021/2230/1 "2021-09-22T13:06:24Z")

</div>

# Smart Contracts & Integrations

**Liquidity Mining Distribution Contracts**

- Merkle Redeem
  - VitaDAO mining started this week; upcoming distribution this coming week
  - Merkle Redeem is deployed to Arbitrum
    - More groups interested in joining the Merkle Fun!

- StakingDistributor vs MerkleOrchard
  - MerkleOrchard in the near term
    - An “orchard” of Merkle trees – distribute multiple tokens from one contract instead of deploying a MerkleRedeem for each new token

  - StakingDistributor in the longer term
    - Final bug fixes for StakingDistributor are going into the contracts following the audit

**Investment Pools**

- Techemy, WSBDapp have [done their testnet integrations](https://twitter.com/WSBDapp/status/1440391832395939844)
- BarnBridge inquiring ([Relevant](https://medium.com/barnbridge/simulating-smart-alpha-c1a309d7903c) article)
  - All they really need is the weight-shifting mechanisms of the Investment Pools. They could have a Smart Contract be the pool owner that has limited hooks that only let it change weights

[**Liquidity Bootstrapping Pools**](https://docs.balancer.fi/core-concepts/protocol/pools#liquidity-bootstrapping-pools)

- Copper
  - aKLIMA LBP did $33.5M in volume and raised $17M
    - Created another $6M in volume in other pools!

- Polygen
  - No updates

- PrimeDAO
  - No updates

**Sidechains & L2**

- [Arbitrum](https://arbitrum.balancer.fi/#/) TVL: ~$47m
  - Subgraph outages: are other teams as reliant on the Subgraph as we are, or do they cache chain data themselves?

- [Polygon](https://polygon.balancer.fi/#/) TVL: ~$153m
  - No news

- Any more side chains or L2 planned? No. Still no.

**Aggregators**

- Conversation has evolved in an interesting way
  - Paraswap is willing to use the SOR but 1inch won’t do that
  - What intermediate tooling can we provide them?
    - An SDK to give them the data they need might go a long way
      - Maybe PoolType/Price/Derivative

  - How can we show 1inch compelling reasons (hard data) that some SOR routes are better than 1inch routes?
    - What routes are they missing out on?
    - Screenshots side by side
    - Possibly a script down the line, but not immediately

# Frontend

**Investment Pools**

- 10+ token functionality is ready on Invest Page, some work needed for pool page
  - Techemy & WSB are expecting high token pools (They have a 20 token pool they want to create)

- Pool-specific metadata (ex “ABC manages this pool”)

**LBPs**

- PR Ready to be merged that links an LBP back to the Copper page for that pool
  - (We’ll need to remove/modify this when there are competing LBP UIs)

**Gnosis Launch**  
Waiting on full solver integration

**Subgraph Changes**

- “Trending pairs” widget/tiles not fillable from the Subgraph alone, TBD how to best calculate and share this information.
- Idea for an analytics subgraph that pulls data from not just Balancer

**Pool Creation**

- Design being finalized, then implementation begins!

# Ecosystem Team

- Marketing
  - Found our video person, going to do a trial run for Gnosis (they’re on board!)
  - Signed “The Writing Studio” to help write blogs, thought-leadership, and more
  - Product Marketing – potentially going to hire for that
    - Someone to explain technical things to DeFi Degens

  - Hackathons!
    - ETHGlobal
      - Jeff already did the talk here

    - Polygon
      - Jeff doing workshop tomorrow

- Biz Dev
  - Progress on the docs
  - Talking to lots of potential partners

- New Grants
  - Atlantis (2D metaverse)
  - A company wants to do real estate trading (w/ KYC)

- Community
  - Tempus postponed their AMA until their Testnet is done
  - Wednesday the 29th for a Tech Call
  - Baller meeting yesterday
  - Another Baller meeting Monday 1PM Eastern

# Want To Get Involved?

Here are some recommended tasks for contributors

- Balancer SOR vs 1inch Router prices
  - Gather data on token pairs/amounts to compare prices through the Balancer SOR and 1inch’s router
  - In what set of conditions does the SOR provide better prices?

- Request that coingecko update token information to include Arbitrum addresses where missing ([https://www.coingecko.com/request](https://www.coingecko.com/request))