Wave Overview
The Balancer Grants program was established in August 2021 after a community discussion before evolving into a Service Provider beginning Wave 5 which we have continued on to now complete Wave 12. This Wave ran from April through to the end of June 2024 with 75k BAL available for new grantees (approved via BIP-573/snapshot).
Looking back at Wave 12 and it’s goals
- Continue to mentor and deliver with existing grantees
This wave has seen 5 new teams approved and 3 grantees complete their deliverables. These have included projects that contributed directly to the Balancer codebase and/or worked closely with the Balancer team to create high value additions like Hooks contract support and Scaffold Balancer. We will continue to promote collaboration for a decentralized network of contributors that will make Balancer more resiliant.
- Fund projects dedicated to increasing adoption of Balancer V3
The Grants committee has focused on this goal by funding:
- new projects to the ecosystem building on V3 (QuantAMM)
- existing projects to adopt V3 (to be announced)
- improvements to devrel (Scaffold Balancer)
- addition of tooling for projects (Buy Bot)
- adding new functionality to V3 (Protofire Hooks + 1 other)
- supporting new chain additions (Mode accelerator prizes)
We have also funded a research project taking a quantitative approach to look at dynamic fee algorithms that could be implemented via hooks or custom pools. More on this below.
As a committee we continue to show ourselves as:
- Diligent assessors of grant applications with intimate understanding of the DAO and protocol.
- Trusted to find and manage grantees building on core Balancer code alongside Balancer Labs. With one grantee being on-boarded to Balancer Labs.
- Fairly recover funds from stale grantees when no longer relevant saving ~30k BAL to date
- Prudent with spending to maintain the grants treasury and limit BAL expenditure
- Supporting grantees to completion by connecting with the resources required including the Balancer core team
- We have a Hooks Repo in development by team members and are actively scoping grants to find teams or narrowing down scope with existing applicants.
Grants Program Expenses
Given the impact to Balancer treasury and revenue, the grants committee all reduced their compensation for the month of June and continuing into Q3. We are committed to our mission of expanding the Balancer ecosystem using strategic grants under $100k USD to allow potential high value projects to build on Balancer. We believe this is especially important now, to drive adoption of Balancer V3. Our spending has always been highly targeted and have never spent our entire funding allowance. We only choose projects that we seen geniune value in.
Grant Achievements
After receiving applications, we approved 5 grants for a total of 44,629 BAL (note with BAL @ $3.00 USD).
Finalized Grants
- Buidl Guidl — Scaffold Balancer | Wave 9
The team from the Buidl Guidl have successfully delivered the first installment of Scaffold Balancer built on the V3 codebase. A temporary deployment was made available to demo the FE and released to partners building custom pools on Balancer V3.
The real success of this grant is that one of the devs who delivered Scaffold Balancer has now been onboarded into Balancer to support the SDK and integrations team. Dream result for a grantee to join the Balancer team after showing real expertise and value. The completed Scaffold Balancer is available in beta at this Github Repo.
- Bleu — Balancer Buy Bot | Wave 12
Balancer now has a working Buy Bot that supports Balancer pools and all the chains where we are deployed. This tool will assist projects to increase awareness of their token sales by automatically sharing transactions with their community groups on Telegram. The Bleu team build for this bot and will continue to host with the potential for future expansion.
The bot has been released publicly with details on the Balancer Tools Hub page for how to use and customize alerts.
- Protofire — Addition of Hooks to Balancer V3 | Wave 11
With the Balancer V3 code release announced and released into the wild, we can now reveal that the Protofire team was instrumental in the development of first iteration of Hooks for Balancer V3. This was an exercise in further decentralizing the development of V3 by having external teams work closely with the Balancer devs to work on core code.
Grantee Updates — Building
The program is proud to present our grantees and their updates in alphabetic order:
- Dynamic Fee Research | Wave 12
The team from Eridani have been awarded a grant to research methods for adjusting dynamic fees to combat LVR in Balancer pools. The grant will conduct research on optimal dynamic AMM fee algorithms for different Balancer pools. The goal of the grant is to simulate and analyze different dynamic fee algorithm alternatives that could be used to redistribute LVR to LPs.
Grant progress so far:
- Data collection and conversion for swaps and liquidity management events.
- Did initial statistical tests to measure viability of different variables as variable fee function inputs.
- Started building a backtester for fees and liquidity provider returns.
- Opal Finance | Wave 11
Opal Finance are building Omnipools on Balancer that allow for exposure across multiple Balancer pools for a single token. The allocation of liquidity is controlled by Opal governance through gauge votes defining the share of an Omnipool’s total liquidity that should be supplied to each underlying pool. The grant is covering Cantina audits to supplement those undertaken by Halborn Security. The first Cantina audit has been completed and the team is in the development phase for Gyro pool integration and L2 expansion.
- Mode Accelerator Prizes | Wave 12
In partnership with Mode launching their Yield Accelerator program, Balancer Grants has offered up $10k in BAL for prizes to be awarded to projects building on Balancer on Mode. The Mode Yield Accelerator has been setup with $10m to fund projects across DeFi, Restaking, CultureFi, AI and Infrastructure, with this program running until June 2024. Balancer will be judging projects built on our protocol and awarding prizes accordingly. For more information see the official Mirror post.
- QuantAMM | Wave 12
We can now announce that QuantAMM has been building on V3 contracts to integrate their temporal function market making pools. The grant will cover development work to enable the QuantAMM protocol to run on Balancer V3 with the ultimate goal to release innovative QuantAMM Blockchain Traded Fund products as part of their Balancer V3 launch partnership.
- The grant will cover, at least, the following development work:
- QuantAMM strategy runner
- QuantAMM trading function hooks
- QuantAMM Balancer V3 base pools and admin functions
- Advanced G3M Multiblock MEV protection features and optimal rebalancing features
- Exploration of more general time decay based withdrawal fee hooks
- Audit costs and fixes
Yet to be announced:
In addition to these, we have 1 grantee working on adding new functionality to the V3 codebase that will be shared once complete. You’ll have to wait until this feature is live before we can share more details. Stay tuned!
We are also in the early stages of the approvals for more projects that will come to light in the coming months. We keep building!