Grants Wave 8 / Q2 Final Report

Service Providers Grants
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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 8. This Wave ran from April to June 2023 with ~55.7k BAL to be allocated to new grantees proposed on Balancer’s governance forum and approved through a subsequent snapshot vote.

We approved 8 grants across 5 teams for a total of 12,540 BAL out of the 55.7k approved, down significantly from previous Waves. We don’t seek to spend the full allocation if the teams applying do not warrant funding, we are more focused on the quality of the projects and their value to Balancer.

How has the Grants SP been doing the last months, and where do we see ourselves going? Let’s find out below!

Looking back at Wave 8 and its goals

At the outset of Wave 8, we shared our focus was unchanged, concentrating on projects (in no particular order) that:

  1. Make Balancer easier for future teams to build on by improving dev documentation, SDKs etc
  2. Develop new use cases and scale Boosted Pools
  3. Find and grow new use cases for soon to be released Managed Pools
  4. Expand to more ecosystems
  5. Leveraging the flexibility of Balancer’s AMM infrastructure to build out new custom pools implementations

This wave, the projects that the committee deemed valuable were focused on tooling/calculators, security and some community outreach/support. Ultimately the projects building new implementations of the Balancer tech stack were a combination of unlikely to gain momentum, still in infancy/hiring core team, too niche for others to adapt and/or not aligned with Balancer’s missions.

We also had a number of research proposals which while interesting, were not convincing of the value to LPs or the Balancer ecosystem. Accurately modelling real-world behaviour in response to protocol changes still appears to be unsolved.

Web3 gaming is coming up more consistently wanting to use Balancer tech for underlying tokens, but we are yet to see a level of adoption that would make this worth funding integrations. As we get more educated on the value proposition, we will continue to revisit this.

We are building a central hub for the tools that the community creates through grants or otherwise to live in docs.balancer.fi to make them more accessible for all. Keep an eye out for this!

We have added to our RFPs but we will always be open to new and unique ideas of how to improve and expand on Balancer’s flexible tech.

Grant Achievements

After receiving 79 applications, 8 proposals across 5 teams have been approved for grants for a total of 12,540 BAL. This total value approved is down 75% from Wave 7 with a similar number of application. As discussed in the beginning of this report, we will not approve projects with a goal of spending out allocated budget. The quality and value to the ecosystem is our main focus.

New Grants this Wave

Baller OGs Xeonus and Zen Dragon are returning to further build out Balancer Tools. This grant will focus on enhancing user experience, streamlining business development, and facilitating governance participation within the Balancer ecosystem. We are excited to support these initiatives, which will further strengthen the accessibility and functionality of Balancer Tools. More details of their grant specifics are here.

bleu is a web3 technology and user experience collaborator for companies and DAOs. With connection to the Balancer ecosystem though Fabio (BLabs) they have provided multiple improvement projects across tooling, visualisations and dapps through grants. So far their contributions have included:

  • Dubstard (Finalized)

Dubstard has been heading up an anti-scam initiative targeting fake Balancer sites, discord phishing attempts and other avenues scammers use to try to steal user funds and information. Dubstard’s contributions keeping Balancer users safe have been invaluable — check out May’s monthly report and the #scam-reports channel in the Balancer discord here.

  • TaliAI

Tali is an intelligent, AI-driven Discord bot designed to answer developer related questions. Tali is trained on Balancer’s developer docs, Medium articles, and codebase. It also has the ability to make web-requests. The bot has been through a guarded private round of testing and is now live for its next phase of testing in the public discord channel #ask-tali-support-beta-channel. We welcome all questions through this trial to help train the AI as answers cannot be 100% relied on at this time but it’s promising technology that we are very excited about.

  • Cosme Fulanito (Finalized)

Cosme is continuing to provide support to Balancer’s Spanish speaking community. Making Balancer’s tech more accessible to all is a key goal of the DAO and Cosme’s work exemplifies this. Grants is funding support and translations until the end of this quarter.

Finalized Grants this Wave

Even after Boot Finance dissolving, those left in the team continued to build out the functionality of CustomSwap. The ground work has been completed and the concept proven but will not progress to be deployed on mainnet. The repo is open source and available for a team to pick it up.

We have completed the lifecycle and the swap functionality tests on Goerli — all contracts are verified and behave as expected.
While Balancer architecture is flexible, it is also complex, so in addition to finalizing the code, we built a front-end to document the AMM’s behavior and to illustrate how a production-ready UI would interact with the contract. The test UI is here Composable Custom Pool
Finally, to explain the mathematics behind the binding curve and quantify its benefits, we set up an analytics simulator — http://customswap-balancer-demo.exchequer.fi/

We are excited to announce the successful launch of Kassandra on Polygon, marking the conclusion of our grant. As an intuitive interface for Balancer Managed Pools, Kassandra empowers users to create, manage, and invest in tokenized crypto portfolios. We invite the Balancer community to join us on this exciting journey and experience the benefits of our application firsthand. Visit us at https://kassandra.finance to explore our offerings and engage with our platform. We look forward to fostering strong relationships with Balancer and its community as we continue to innovate together and provide cutting-edge solutions in DeFi.

During this month of April, the project was finalised. The last step was to develop the investment page that allows joining the Balancer liquidity pools.

The site is deployed at this address: https://balancer-ui.org

The source code is here: GitHub - nma100/balancer-minimal-ui

Many thanks to the Balancer DAO for supporting this project.

The governance pages were updated, and continue to be updated based on feedback from the community and in the end seem to provide a decent understanding of how things work if you go through them.

In the end, it turned out that much of the other documentation we needed was more about automation. Most of the time was spent writing code to pull data from various Balancer Repositories and build always up to date views of our Contract and Permissions. The timelock authorizer roll-out was delayed, so this documentation work was not done or paid out.

In many cases for the Maxis, documentation became automation and reports, that just now runs and is well defined/understood using common patterns.

An additional surprise development of all this was the bal_addresses repo, which is still a WIP, but functions as an easy to use source of truth about the current state of Balancers deployments and configure. Work is continuing on this via the Balancer Maxis. Grant info.

Grantee Updates — Building

The program is proud to present our grantees and their updates in alphabetic order:

Bleu’s Wave 8 saw completion of key tools enhancing Balancer’s user experience.

During Wave 8, we launched the Internal Manager that gives users an interface to manage tokens in the Vault’s internal balance which is accessible here.

We also worked on one of a series of tools supporting Pools simulation — StableSwap Simulator, which helps understand stable pool behaviors and is live here.

Our bot delivering real-time metrics about Balancer’s pools is live on Twitter at twitter.com/balancerstats and in Balancer’s Discord in the #metrics channel. You can also get selected stats using a slash (/) command from any channel in Balancer’s Discord:

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The Pool Metadata tool, allowing easy management of pool data, is live here (mainnet deployment pending), and we’re working towards integrating it directly to Balancer’s frontend here.

During Wave 8, we also contributed to balpy by integrating the Vault functions that had not been accessible before. The (already merged) PR with that work can be found here.

Looking ahead, we aim to continue our journey of learning and innovation. We’re open to PRs and issues to the repo where these tools are being developed (GitHub - bleu-studio/balancer-tools).

We are in the process of gathering the funds for the first audit. A first code check by our security engineer was very positive and we are heading for a 3 day audit. As soon as we have finalized the funding, we will start with the audit.

Right now we are still optimizing the contracts. We need to make them smaller to work with all of the functions and then implement the math for borrow positions in the UI. The team is focused on launching 50/50 first then weighted after.

The team has been working on the development of the testnet, planned to go live in July. There will be integrations with multiple protocols including Balancer, launching staggered over a few weeks due to the various complexities involved.

The Symmetric team has completed initial work based on GoodDollars’ specifications noted in the grant agreement. Controllers and the UI project have been finished and we’ve moved on to the initial internal testing phase using test tokens. The next step will be to expand testing before submitting phase two. Finally, phase 3 will bring an audit and completion of the grant cycle.

With priorities on Notional V3, this grant work is on hold. The team remains ready on the smart contract side, but requires some more work on the frontend to get that ready for completion. Once Notional V3 is launched, the grant work will continue.

We have been working on the whitelisting functionality for the pools, so only whitelisted wallets are able to interact with a pool. For now we have been able to implement so users can whitelist their wallets and view pools / tokens, next is to implement the swap functionality based on if a wallet is whitelisted or not

The first SMP is live, in production on Gnosis Chain. It is co-owned by a number of members of the Autonolas community. It implements the Crypto Fear and Greed Index as specified in the original proposal. Check out the pool: ManagedPool | Address 0x4d7adc5e362a97b5ba1b02bc0447249ac81e76ad | GnosisScan. Depositors can reach out to the owners of the pool to request to join. Developers are encouraged to fork the SMP code, create their own services and run them via the Autonolas protocol where they can participate in the protocol tokenomics — more info: Build Autonomous Asset Management Products

Current Status:

  • contracts complete.
  • audit complete
  • final security review still needed on zap contract.

Next steps:

  • deploy zap contract and launch UI
  • kick off gauge voting

FXMetapool
-We’re going through finals testing on both public testnet and mainnet forks. For those interested in participating testing instructions can be found here →
FXMetaPool - Xave Finance.

Frontend feature updates:
-Users can now access and preview the Swap, Pool and Strats pages in the Xave app without having to connect their wallet
-Users can now switch between networks without connecting their wallets

Other Updates:
-The Xave team is conducting final testing for the Smart Order Router integration
-We’re underway with development for the frontend integration of Balancer’s VE for the XAV token
-We’ve scheduled our contract audit and expect completion by the end of August

Grants Program Expenses

The grants treasury is in a good position despite a falling BAL price. Our spend was significantly less than previous waves making our funding request for Wave 9/Q3 small even after no request for Wave 8/Q2.

We were below budget for committee payments with most grantees being quite self sufficient requiring minimal assistance coordination, allowing committee members to take smaller roles or opt out where necessary due to external commitments. We also came in below our budget for design and subscriptions using the opportunity to cover some subscriptions for a year vs monthly, these additional funds have contributed to offsetting next wave’s budget.

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Next Wave…

With BalancerDAO having moved to a Service Provider structure, we have published our proposal to the Balancer Forum for Q3 budget approval awaiting a snapshot vote to begin next week. Our request to top up the treasury (currently 35,087 BAL uncommitted) for 55k BAL to future grantees and 4,667 BAL + 25,500 USDC for committee/support.

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If approved, we will use the existing BAL to continue to fund more projects that will expand the Balancer ecosystem. As always, we welcome comments and recommendations from the community on how to better develop the Balancer grants program.

Round Up Event

6th July @ 11am EST we will host a Round Up on Discord where our grantees can give a short update and we will end with a Q&A. You are all welcome to join us!

Wave 8 has ended, but grants will continue. Apply now!

If you are interested in supporting the development of the Balancer Ecosystem or want to build on top of the Balancer Protocol, this is your chance! Get started by filling in the Grants Application form. You can also check out our RFP page for inspiration! We also have an application guide for what we’re looking for in a grant submission here.

For further questions about how the Grants SP works, check out the grants page, follow us on Twitter, or send an email to grants@balancer.community.

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