Orb Collective December 2022 Update

Happy new year, everyone. Here is our community update for December.

Our team collectively took a 2 week break to recharge during the holidays, so this update is for the work we did during the first 2 weeks of December.

Also because of the break, we’re now undertaking the process of revising our ecosystem goals for Q1 and developing the Q1 roadmap. Here is the current status of that process:

  • Q4 retrospective held on Dec 14
  • Q1 goals ecosystem meeting held on Jan 5
  • Q1 proposal submissions started today (Jan 6), running until Jan 11
  • Proposal peer reviews & feedback: Jan 12- 13
  • Proposal finalization & Q1 team capacities: Jan 16
  • Q1 proposal “funding” (voting) meeting: Jan 17
  • Start working on Q1 projects: Jan 18

Our revised goals for Q1 2023:

Strengthen the DAO’s resiliency and sustainability

  • Reduce the gap between DAO revenues and expenses
  • Promote Balancer’s further decentralization
  • Understand and proactively protect against potential threats from legal/regulatory changes

Make Balancer easier to use

  • Make it easier for developers to integrate with Balancer
  • Make it easier for developers to build solutions on top of Balancer
  • Improve the UX for end-users of the Balancer front-end

Increase Balancer’s marketshare

  • Increase TVL on existing L2 and side chain ecosystems
  • Scale usage of products in Balancer’s existing product suite
  • Define and optimize the process of rolling out Balancer onto new ecosystems
  • Expand into new ecosystems with the highest strategic value
  • Increase yield-bearing liquidity held on Balancer
  • Promote the nesting of composable pools

Drive increased veBAL participation

  • Onboard strategically aligned entities into veBAL
  • Promote an evenly distributed level of competition

Admin / Ops

  • We completed our ecosystem’s very first Performance Review Cycle. Our 360 cycle consisted of self, peer, upward and downward reviews to get a holistic view of how contributors are performing. We created and conducted trainings for managers and non-managers on how to write reviews, deliver feedback effectively, avoid biases and learn about the structure of our review system. Our cycle closed in mid-December with managers meeting with their teams to discuss their performance feedback. So far we have received a general positive sentiment on how the review cycle went. We plan to run a quick survey to gather concrete feedback so we can improve the next cycle and make it even better.
  • We held an AMA on Governance, Risk and Compliance with Beth. Beth kicked this off with an update on the regulatory environment and we then went into both live and submitted questions. We had 19 attendees and the engagement was high!
  • We kicked off our Q1 Roadmapping process and held a Q4 Ecosystem Retrospective. We decided to repurpose December’s All Hands as a Q4 retrospective. The retrospective is part of the ecosystem’s roadmapping process. This was an optional meeting and we had a great turnout of 30+ attendees that included members from each entity and SP. For a first pass at a virtual retrospective we viewed this as a success! How did the meeting run? Using a virtual collaboration tool, participants posted notes to a “What Went Well” board and a “Room For Improvement” board. We then split into two groups where themes were decided and then discussed. For the “Room For Improvement” board, themes were voted on to identify the top two areas that should be focused on in the next coming months. Those two themes are 1) Project Management/Deadlines/Planning and 2) Documentation and a better written culture. The next step in the roadmapping process is a Q1 Ecosystem Goals Brainstorm that is happening on Jan-5.

Team-Specific Updates, grouped by Q4 ecosystem goals:

Make Balancer easier to use

INTEGRATIONS

  • Completed core content for new integrator-focused Boosted Pool docs, now reviewing and revising
  • Refining Managed Pool docs
  • Peer-reviewed a TWAMM smart contract implementation
  • Updated documentation around governance after the transition to veTokenomics
  • Updated screen recordings for veBAL from the docs
  • Added BIP19 and yield bearing tokens description
  • Created an entry page for the Balancer x Certora Accelerator
  • Updated fee structure details
  • Enhanced the description for custom pools and added relevant examples
  • Maintained deployment addresses up to date and listed Gnosis chain deployments
  • Meetings with key stakeholders on how to advance the effort for documentation

DESIGN

  • Marketing website (balancer.fi)

    • Refining the updated homepage design launched last year to add new partners, and clean up the UI to make things more clear.
    • Designing / building new pages for each partner case study, to provide more in-depth case studies.
    • Work in progress design and content for the build page and some new pages (including ecosystem page, brand page, about page).
  • Web app (app.balancer.fi)

    • Page transition animation work to have softer, smoother page transitions across the app (PR)
    • Warnings around pools containing renBTC (PR)
    • Minor UX improvements (like this, and this)

Scale Boosted Pools and veBAL.

INTEGRATIONS

  • Linear Pool integrations repository is ~80% complete. The following integrations will be included at launch later this month:
    • Aave (also used for Aave forks)
    • ERC-4626 (supports many modern protocols)
    • Gearbox
    • Euler
    • Yearn
    • Beefy
    • Silo
  • Boosted Pools Launch documentation and integration support
    • Created an external contribution guide to help teams build on Balancer with Generalized Boosted Pools
    • Worked together with the Smart Contracts teams to design and set the structure of the documentation for Boosted Pools

DESIGN

  • For generalized deep boosted pools:
    • Testing + final design and front-end development tweaks before its launch (PR)

MARKETING

  • Partner Boosted Pools Launch Planning
    • The marketing team spent most of December preparing for the launch of Generalized Boosted Pools, which has been pushed back by engineering until further notice.
      • Created blog content for the launch of boosted pools.
      • Planned a Twitter Spaces to be held on Balancer’s twitter account with launch partners and members of the community. The purpose of this Twitter space was to talk about the Generalized Boosted Pools launch and the projects building on Gen Boosted Pools on Balancer. Also would have increased engagement and impressions by having so many eyeballs on Balancer in Q4 with this launch and would have solidified relationships with our partners Gearbox and Overnight who were building on Balancer.
      • Created a shortlist of media outlets and journalists we would exclusively pitch the launch to, in order to get the highest amount of exposure to the appropriate audience we were targeting for Generalized Boosted Pools.
      • Creative directed graphics to be made to coincide with the launch of Generalized Boosted Pools.
      • Had meetings with partners Gearbox, Frax and Overnight about their own launch plans, how we could coordinate for wider exposure, and ways to collaborate on the partner marketing side.

Develop and launch Managed Pools use cases.

INTEGRATIONS

  • Ongoing Managed Pool Controller audit with Certora
  • After discovering a key issue in our Managed Pool Controller in November, we have been spending time reframing our strategy for Q1. We are actively conducting market research to determine where we can best prioritize our efforts. There are many interested parties and we want to expand our focus and scale our efforts beyond any single use case.

Brand Building - Marketing Team

In December, we spent more time getting Balancer’s name into the discussion. We’ve increased our Twitter content and facilitated Balancer’s presence in the media.

Balancer’s estimated reach vs. competitors

Media plays a big role in brand building, and Orb’s marketing team specializes in working with key PR contributors to help secure Balancer in big industry publications.

First, we secured Balancer Labs CEO Fernando Martinelli a feature in an article in the NASDAQ: Why Decentralized Exchanges are Unscathed Despite Centralized Crypto Collapse

Orb’s marketing team was able to secure legal advisor to the DAO, Beth Haddock, a key quote in The Defiant:

While token-based governance models are not perfect, they empower a project’s community to make proposals and direct the future operations and structure of DAOs, said Beth Haddock, a strategic advisor to Balancer.

“Just like with voting in a political system, you either believe your vote counts or you decide you can’t make a difference,” Haddock told The Defiant. “If you believe in the power of DeFi and collective engagement then there is an opportunity to collaborate, advocate and bundle individual votes.”

We have conducted partner marketing and promotion discussions with the following teams in the past month:

  • Zerion
  • Beethoven
  • Fjord Foundry
  • Solace
  • Immunefi
  • Aura
  • Overnight
  • Gyroscope
  • Tranchess
  • Sense
  • Superfluid
  • Autonolas
  • Polygon
  • 1inch
  • Element Finance
  • Lido
  • Stader Labs
  • ParaSwap
  • Galxe

We’re off to the races in 2023!

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