Hello Balancer Community! Orb is trying something new this month re: our updates. Instead of Jeremy posting everything, our team leads are going to post their own. We are doing this to create a more direct connection between the community and each of our team leads. Let us know what you think of this format! We’ll continue to iterate as needed.
I’m going to start my update with a reminder on Balancer’s ecosystem goals:
1. 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
2. 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
3. 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
4. Drive increased veBAL participation
- Onboard strategically aligned entities into veBAL
- Promote an evenly distributed level of competition
So what’s been going on in the world of ecosystem ops?
We are deep into Barcelona ONsite planning.
As a reminder, the goals of our ecosystem ONsites are 1) in-person brainstorms and collaboration meetings and 2) team bonding. With flights and lodging secured we have been focusing on our meeting agenda and venues for shared meals and experiences. We’ve also been thinking through how to keep costs down so we stay within budget, since we have more attendees than originally planned for. This is a good problem to have IMO.
We’ve been working on higher detailed financial updates. Jeremy and I have been thinking through how to provide more transparency into Orb’s forecast and spend. A few weeks ago I posted a detailed, line by line explanation of our Q1 forecast and a more granular comparison between our updated forecast and what we originally requested for Orb’s Q1 2023 (in our initial proposal for August 2022-July 2023). We will continue to post updates like these quarterly.
Balancer University is live! In partnership with the ecosystem’s entity leads, we created Balancer University to be part of our ecosystem onboarding. Via video, each entity lead describes what their entity does, who makes it up and examples of projects they are either working on or have completed. Every new ecosystem member is asked to watch the series of videos and note down questions that they will have the opportunity to ask the entity leads in a live Q&A.
We welcomed and onboarded one new ecosystem member, Igor! Igor joined BLabs as a Smart Contracts Engineer. Backend onboarding includes adding new members to our shared ecosystem tools and our Barcelona ONsite. Frontend onboarding includes meeting with them to go over how the ecosystem works, our shared tools and processes and to answer any questions they might have.
Ecosystem Engagement Survey prep. We are managing an ecosystem-wide engagement survey. We are almost done narrowing down what questions will be asked and will be rolling out the survey in a few weeks. The goal here is to get a tangible sense on how core ecosystem contributors feel about what’s going well and what needs improvement.
Ecosystem Hub updates. We are consistently updating our ecosystem hub (on notion) to reflect the latest team meetings, process updates, entity updates and announcements. We see a ton of value in having a source of truth for the things that we are collectively working on together as an ecosystem.