Orb Collective January 2023 Update

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Orb Collective January 2023 Update

The Orb team has started off the new year focused and energized! Here’s an update on what we worked on last month.

Roadmapping & Goal-setting

Orb held several ecosystem-wide meetings and collaborative projects in January focused on updating Balancer’s high-level goals and Q1 roadmap:

• Q1 goals ecosystem meeting
• Q1 project proposal submissions, peer reviews, revisions, finalization
• Estimation of Q1 team capacities
• Q1 proposal “funding” (voting) meeting

We started collectively working on our roadmap of Q1 projects on Jan 18th.

Current Balancer ecosystem goals:

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

Finances

In line with our goal to strengthen the DAO’s resiliency and sustainability, we’ve continued to actively minimize our financial footprint as a team.

As we recently shared in our Q1 financial update, we’ve cut our forecasted budget for January - March 2023 by 33%, saving $336,808 for the quarter, compared to our originally approved budget. Like every previous month since our launch, we’ve done this voluntarily out of our alignment with the best interests of the Balancer protocol and DAO.

Additionally, as mentioned in our updates below, we identified and analyzed an opportunity to save the DAO $17,000 in OpCo costs.

During these depressed market conditions, cutting costs and keeping our team as lean as possible has been of utmost priority, even though it means forgoing needed resources and making all of our jobs more difficult. We’re committed to Balancer’s success and that’s what we’re fighting for.

Admin / Ops

• We created an updated Q1 forecast. Over the last few weeks, many hours were spent with our Finance Team to identify areas where we could be leaner, spend less and be more cost efficient.
• Barcelona ONsite planning officially kicked off. We are getting ecosystem core contributors together in person in Barcelona, Spain in mid-April. A kickoff email was sent to all invited attendees with preliminary information. So far, flights have been booked and lodging secured. We will be spending the next 1-2 months planning the agenda that will consist of a mix of full-team and sub-team meetings and shared meals and experiences with the goals of 1) team bonding and 2) in-person brainstorms and collaboration meetings.
• We held our January All Hands. The majority of this month’s meeting focused on sharing the outcome of our Q1 Roadmapping exercise: what projects were funded and why. We also welcomed new ecosystem contributors and had an open Q&A.

Marketing

Marketing has voluntarily declined to request a budget for Q1, instead using funds that we saved by minimizing spending in 2022, cutting costs overall, and implementing a leaner plan for ETHDenver.

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Team updates grouped by ecosystem goals:

Strengthen the DAO’s resiliency and sustainability

MARKETING

• Created an external comms plan for the incident disclosed on Jan 6, effectively and cohesively informing LPs about the issue in a timely manner so that no at-risk funds were exploited.
  • This required working cross functionally with Balancer Labs, Orb, and Maxi members so that all affected parties would be made aware as soon as the issue could be disclosed to the public.
  • Because it was a slower news week, media picked up on the story and this required Orb marketing to communicate with journalists about the issue and mitigate any potential negative misunderstandings from hitting the press.
  • Created subsequent Twitter threads informing the community about the Balancer Emergency subDAO and Emergency Pause mechanism.

DESIGN

• Marketing website
  • Added new partners & new case study pages. This helps to demonstrate the decentralized nature of the Balancer protocol.

GRC

• Strengthen resiliency & sustainability with risk management management for reg and legal risks & protect against threats:
  • Proposal for self-insurance fund amendment drafted & vetting for vote
• Track threats to DAO and ecosystem within the reg environment:
  • Adjusting for environment with code is law effort re: drafting controls to match anti-fraud, theft & manipulation efforts. DeFi Education call re: US/Global Developments re threats - Expect FinCEN risk assessment in Feb; Less focus on ATS & Dealer rules in Q1
• Strengthen resiliency with cost management:
  • Covering work to enable potential cost savings ($17,000) for OpCo with analysis, drafting and coordination for virtual asset service provider requirements. i.e., BVI resources for compliance - savings & VASP memo drafted
• Strengthen sustainability & decentralization stance with governance work so SPs act as effective legal agents of DAO: Amendments and corporate resolution complete re:
  • ETH Foundation & register; new director onboarding

Make Balancer easier to use

INTEGRATIONS

• Ongoing Managed Pool Controller audit with Certora.
• Began to address findings from the Managed Pool Controller peer review.
• Assisted multiple projects looking to launch Managed Pools with information about various pool interactions. The goal is to continually decrease the time to deploy successive Managed Pools, and this includes some infrastructure and documentation setup on our end.

DESIGN

• Marketing website:
  • Migrated the marketing site from Nuxt 2 to Nuxt 3 with Tailwind 3.
    • Upgrading provides a better developer experience and allows more people across the ecossytem, including from Balancer OpCo, to more easily contribute.
  • Implemented Nuxt Content V2 to enable better content management and collaboration
    • This enables some content to be managed with markdown files which allows less technical people to be able to update content.
  • Designed, drafted and built new case study pages and added new partners.
  • Designing new information architecture for build page and sub-pages
  • Created new diagram styles + new diagrams for docs site.

• Web app:

  • Designed new pool share section to be display on pool pages (PR ready)
    • This shows the exact percentage of tokens in a pool vs target weight. It also shows LPs their share of the pool and token exposure.
  • Fixed bugs on tree structure for 3-level deep pools (live)
  • Created a new public Figma doc outlining requirements for Partners who want to add liquidity management modules on the Pool Page that links to their page.
  • Tested Alberto’s Tailwind 3 upgrade and fixed some UI bugs
  • Redesigning the portfolio page and claims page (work in progress)

GRC

• BVI efficiencies and determination BVI VASP requirements do not apply, avoids additional complexity

Increase Balancer’s marketshare

MARKETING

• Planned and hosted an AMA on the @Balancer handle with partner Stader. Hosted members of the Balancer ecosystem as well as Stader CEO in an effort to highlight the ways that Balancer has grown on other chains like Polygon.
  • Had over 280 attendees and created a stronger bond with partner Stader
• Collaborated with Polygon and co-hosted an AMA with Polygon leaders on their handle and exposing Balancer technology to 1.8 million of their followers.
  • Had over 2k people tune in to the AMA, which will be just the first in a series of AMAs and awareness campaigns to Polygon users
• Edited and published article Creating Liquidity Strategies With Balancer Managed Pool Controllers- Creating Liquidity Strategies With Balancer Managed Pool Controllers | by 0xEvan | Balancer Protocol | Jan, 2023 | Medium
• Created a thread on twitter to highlight partner Gyroscope, which saw high engagement compared to other tweets over the same time period
• Planned and strategized for ETHDenver
  • Came up with a strategic in person event strategy with limited funds for maximum exposure
  • Submitted CFPs for two speaking opportunities for EthDenver with Balancer partners
  • Secured speaking opportunity for DeFi Denver

INTEGRATIONS

• Boosted Pools:
  • Linear Pool integrations are deployment-ready. They have been fork-tested and testnet-deployed in preparation for upcoming mainnet deployments. Each includes:
    • A Rebalancer companion contract.
    • Versioning.
    • Protocol IDs to support data feeds for protocol forks.
    • Recent fixes for non-compliant ERC-20s like USDT.
    • The ExternalCallLib to protect against malicious queries.
  • The following new and updated Linear Pool factories will be rolled out in the coming weeks, giving LPs even more choices as to their preferred yield platforms for Balancer liquidity:
    • Aave v2
    • Beefy
    • ERC-4626 (Aave v3 and many more)
    • Euler
    • Gearbox
    • Reaper
    • Silo
    • Tetu
    • Yearn
  • Prepared 6 new wrapper modules for the Batch Relayer to accompany new Linear Pool integrations.
• Reviewed Aave v3 token wrapper contracts to confirm compatibility with existing Linear Pool infrastructure.
• Reviewed 3 new RateProvider contracts to enable broader usage of Balancer StablePools.

Drive increased veBAL participation

DESIGN

• Designed new veBAL filters for the web app (live)
  • This allows people to search based on tokens and hide expired pools.

GRC

• Referral to biz dev

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Incident Response

Due to a recently discovered issue, the Integrations Team has also spent a considerable amount of time this month working with partners to secure their upcoming deployments and protect applications in production. This includes analysis of at least 15 different partner codebases. Full public disclosure is coming very soon.

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Brand Building - Marketing Team

• Twitter update for January (over a 28 day period):

Tweet impressions
1.32M (548.6% increase)
Profile visits
67.3K (3.3% increase)
Mentions
1,522 (15.7% increase)
Followers
135K (1,658 increase)

• reDEFIne campaign
  • The Orb marketing team also worked on a marketing campaign with over 15 different DeFi projects which made a big splash this week. Orb marketing has taken the lead on the comms side, securing a press exclusive.