Dear @saf ,
Thank you for your message.
Let me tell you what I’ve been working on during the past six months. Please note, this is only Partnership and not Marketing.
Hopefully this will give you a better understanding of what happened and where the blockers were.
January:
- Overnight and integration. Overnight contributed heavily to the development of the ERC4626Linearpool. You can ask Rab about their contribution; Overnight is one of those “waste of time projects” that helped with the development and received nothing in return [disgraceful];
- Partnership with BanklessDAO LM incentives in exchange of visibility and Marketing activities.
- Lido Balancer partnership and agreement of exclusivity to bring stMATIC only to Balancer
- Agreement with Shardlabs (one of the best labs in web3) to build a fork of Balancer (Mistral) on Avalanche with consequent deal Avalabs<>Mistral for a LM program of 1M$ in AVAX tokens for a period of 6 months. The initial plan failed because shardlabs decided not to pursue the project due to some internal and external conflicts.
- The story with Redacted Cartel starts here (another small project/waste of time according to some) as veBAL started to take shape internally (this is a cooperation that continues today as you might know).
February:
- Initially the work has been around the development of Managed pools and the approach to Index Coop. This was done under the lead of BLabs with Alan and Jared;
- Support to Koil finance (another fork) that suffered an internal hack
- Started the initial talks with APY.vision (partnership that continues today);
- Interacted with llama.xyz for Dao treasury management;
- Supported blackcoffee for a potential fork on BSC (team from Ukraine which unfortunately did not continue due to war)
- Partnership with Huobi wallet
- Held several conversations with boringdao for the bridging of BAL tokens crosschain.
All this while working with Avalabs to find a quality team able to perform a successful fork. So we held conversations with BenQi; Midas and others until the DeFrost team was found and Terralabs willing to collaborate in the project.
March:
- Approached Aztec Network and looked for an integration team able to help there. Rab is in the convo but this is another dead end given the fact I didn’t have access to an integration team that would do all the work. BTW, this is a huge opportunity overlooked by many. This may serve as a public record when that day will come.
- Held various conversations with Cowswap before and after veBAL (initially for simple LM allocations, later for bribing. They are one of the few projects that are going to bribe)
- Held several conversations with MakerDAO ecosystem teams, the most impactful today is Stablenode, actively participating in governance discussions.
- Initiated discussions with socket for BPT crosschain swaps following the idea of having multiple independent teams working in parallel and having and easy swapping solution across chains for BPTs.
- Engaged with Staderlabs (Balancer) which today is one of the few project actually participating in the BALwars or whatever you want to call it;
- Engaged with Pickle Finance: their proposal is here: ([Proposal] Allowlist Pickle Finance in veBAL’s VotingEscrow)
- Held a panel at the Avalanche Summit in Barcelona
April:
- Engaged with Connext. Connext is a infrastructure player. Again involved in crosschain swaps. The conversation is still ongoing and Beethoven is part of the conversation. At the moment is however all in standby given the general uncertainty regarding the continuation or not of my role within Balancer.
- Continued the support for the development of Hexagon;
- Engaged with Kava Network to bring Balancer there;
- Engaged with OKC, same reason.
- Held several meetings with Neon Labs for the possible development of another Friendly Fork on their chain;
- Supported Symmetric in their FF proposal (things went wrong for reasons outside of my control)
- Attended Devconnect AMS, held a panel at the DAOist;
- Engaged with the Maker-growth to explore the possibility to use Balancer pools as collateral on Maker;
- Held initial conversations with Darkness, a Fork of Balancer on Chronos;
- Attended Spaghett.eth in Milan and connected with Idle Finance (the blocker here is again outside of my control – integration team and bLabs priorities)
All this while providing support to smaller teams that approached Balancer via different channels, given several interviews while exponentially growing the network. I’ll save you from that. All I can say is that every few projects, there is one that is worthwhile following.
Since mid-May however, the new SP proposal and talks have honestly slowed things down and halted most of the work.
I believe many are suffering from recency bias when judging the Partnership work.
lack of any tangible progress for about the last 6 months.
Probably you’ve been living under a rock my friend. Would have been enough asking around (internally and externally). However, I admit I’ve failed to properly communicate the progress.
We have a notion page (not sure you are aware the DAO has one) accessible here: Notion – The all-in-one workspace for your notes, tasks, wikis, and databases.
I used to keep it up to date, but the amount of work was so overwhelming that I literally collapsed on it.
Moreover, my team was terrible and provided zero support. In fact, most of the times conspired against me. Ops knows, everyone knows, no-one speaks so to have a nice and easy cruise.
Since Danko joined, he brought back so much fresh air and things started to pick up again. This is the cold, hard truth unfortunately.
Bringing up TVL and trading volume during a bear market is a very fallacious way of arguing success
I disagree here. veBAL had a huge impact on TVL. And please prove me otherwise utilizing data from our competitors (Uniswap and Sushi or whoever you think makes sense) and please don’t cherry pick numbers. Numbers don’t lie. A whopping >70% drop in TVL is just not “bear market”. A good chunk of my assets were invested in Balancer pools, now its all gone and sitting somewhere else.
Personally, I’ve never been a fan of the model but accepted the general consensus because I thought “well, I might be missing something here”. But locking a CRV shitcoin with the promise of getting more CRV shitcoins the longer I lock, to me doesn’t change the dynamic that much.
BAL inflation is still high with the difference now whales can play the system and allocate those tokens to their shitcoin pools.
the only reason FF’s are considered a success is due to the quality of the BEET’s team.
While I admire the Beets team, they are not The Avengers. There is a general consensus again that only Beets can be successful, and I would say that smoking your own crack doesn’t help you making a rational analysis. To me my wife is the hottest woman in the world, some might disagree and find their wife the best. Same thing here.
I own beets and never sold. But this doesn’t make me a beets maxi or anything maxi for that matter. I’ve interacted with amazing teams during this time, it blows my mind seeing such a sense of superiority among some of our team members.