Dear Balancer community,
As part of our commitment to accountability, transparency and open communication, we’re pleased to share another update with the Balancer community. This report details our progress since Q3 and outlines our ongoing efforts to support the protocol.
1. Liaising with the board on budgets, project proposals, and matters particularly as it relates to service providers including the BVI subsidiary
As part of this role, reporting to the Foundation Board and the Ecosystem Council is being done in a timely manner on all matters of importance including financial status, funding projections, program operations, employee matters. Also management has been providing adequate materials and analysis to assist the board in making decisions on all matters of importance.
2. Manage Finances and Service Providers
Alongside @Lemma, we have concluded Q3 financial reports and Lemma published the Balancer FY24 Q3 Transparency Report in October.
@karpatkey has been monitoring off-chain expenses through regular reporting of bank statements and access of Foundation’s accounting and bookkeeping (see latest State of the DAO presentations here). While in Bangkok, alongside Karpatkey and Maxis, we held a session to clarify roles and responsibilities between the SPs regarding the DAO’s Treasury and Risk Management.
Every on-chain transaction is pre-approved by the Balancer Foundation board (¾ multisig). All the off-chain payments are overseen by the board, @Lemma and @karpatkey for cross-referencing and sanity checks.
This quarter was particularly more challenging, due to the overhead of bookkeeping for irl event participation and marketing efforts for v3 launch.
3. Compliance and Risk Management
We continue monitoring the depth of BAL in exchanges through market makers in order to further enhance decentralization and protocol adoption, as well as monitoring veBAL for a plural environment of stakeholders. Data shows a healthy situation for sdBAL and a great comeback effort for auraBAL after the latest depegging in December. These are considered today to be the main liquid wrappers for governance participation.
Source: https://dune.com/balancer/vebal-wrappers*
*
Other accomplishments in this field include:
- AML training: 10 contributors attendance + local BVI compliance officer
- Immunify agreement approved to include v3 monorepo on bug bounty
- Regulatory and risks discussions surrounding LBP tech
- Annual review of risks for Balancer OpCo and SPs to the Balancer DAO
4. Community Engagement
With v3 launch, our focus for Q4 was to foster contributor engagement and looking ahead for post-launch plans. Mainly, we objectively directed our energies towards irl event participation, which required some planning and budgeting, and user support on Discord, including the Holidays with close to none downtime.
- Bangkok ONsite recap
- Devcon Marketing recap
- ETH Denver planning (budgeting, hackathon, attendance, flights/accommodations)
- Weekly newsletter The Balancer Report published every Monday
- Discord activity increase post v3 launch
- Polygon governance delegate application representing Balancer
- Review of Hypernative’s security guidelines
- Panda role and security concerns
- Hookathon proved to be good talent retention for builders
Discord visitors slightly peaked during v3 launch, while retention remained similar
Worth mentioning, the Anti-Scam Initiative was specially active due to v3, and scammers went wild sending phishing e-mail and creating fake accounts. Once again, @dub20 worked on keeping our community safe from bad actors, reporting and taking down malicious websites.
5. What’s next?
Please expect the financial analysis for Q4 dropping in due time, as well as the full year report after the Balancer Foundation board meeting. Check out data metrics below regarding our ticket system and user support (Discord).
