Orb Collective May 2023 Integrations Update

Service Providers Orb Collective
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Here’s an update on everything we did last month. First, we have a couple of administrative notes, and then we will describe our engineering efforts.

Offboarding

On Friday, June 9, we will bid farewell to @joaobrunoah, who has decided to leave the Balancer ecosystem to pursue other passions. It has been an honor to work with João over the last several months, and he will be sorely missed! We wish him the best of luck with the next phase of his career.

This reduces our headcount moving forward from 5 engineering FTEs to 4. The June budget forecast has already accounted for this change. We spent some time toward the end of May ensuring that João’s ongoing work would be wrapped up or transitioned to other engineers.

SP Transition

As has already been discussed at length on this forum, Orb Collective will cease to be funded on July 31 of this year and has no plans to continue as an organization beyond that date.

The Integrations Team wishes to continue contributing to the Balancer ecosystem through another service provider, and we are well on our way toward crafting that plan. The ecosystem should expect to see a new SP funding proposal on this forum before the end of June.

We have dedicated approximately half of our May resources to this effort, with much of that concentrated toward the beginning of the month as we strategized on short notice following Orb’s defunding.

Engineering

We align all of our work to the May-July roadmap specified in our RFC. This roadmap focuses primarily on Dev UX, a few ongoing partner projects, and engineering services for the Balancer Maxis. The work below is presented in approximate descending order of time spent in the month of May.

Documentation

Goal: Provide third-party developers with the deep knowledge they need to scale Balancer integrations beyond what is possible with manual partner support.

Completed work from roadmap:

Completed work from outside of roadmap:

In review:

  • Scaling and Rate Providers (GitHub)
    • Applicability in Stable Pools
    • Applicability in Weighted Pools
    • Swap transactions showing calculations & call trace
  • Managed Pools

Small-scope Engineering Services

This month we spent more time than we had budgeted for code reviews. In particular, the Balancer Maxis have been producing a lot of code that needs a second set of eyes. We are happy to lend our engineering expertise to the Balancer ecosystem wherever it is needed, but we will have to keep tabs on this work into the month of June or risk falling behind on our stated roadmap. At present, I believe we are still on track for July 31, but we are cutting it a bit close.

Goal: Provide ad hoc engineering services for key ecosystem participants.

Completed reviews:

In progress:

BPT as Collateral

Goal: Create external demand for BPT, develop business relationships with the lending sector, and improve visibility of Balancer as a premiere AMM platform.

Relevant work (completed/ongoing):

Scaffold

Goals: Provide third-party developers with a UI-enabled test harness for rapid prototyping.

Completed work:

  • Custom eth-components replacement library (GitHub)

Ongoing work:

  • Unit tests
  • Documentation

B.Protocol Boosted Pool

Goal: Create a liquidity sink for Liquity LUSD on Balancer.

Completed work:

  • Established technical feasibility
  • Developed technical requirements for wrapper contract to handle deposits/withdrawals & LM claims

Ongoing work:

  • Establish economic feasibility

Remaining Work

A simplified version of the remaining roadmap is presented below. This is compiled from the original roadmap minus any items above marked completed or in the final stages of review.

  • Documentation
    • Solidity code snippets for swaps/joins/exits
    • Scaffold-balancer usage guide
    • Managed Pools
      • Add/remove tokens
      • Circuit breakers
      • LP allowlists
      • Enable/disable join/exit
  • Example contracts
    • Custom pools
    • BPT price oracles
    • Managed Pool Controllers
  • BPT as collateral
    • Aave integration
    • Other ongoing/as-needed support requests
  • Cron Finance
    • As-needed support (none outstanding)
  • B.Protocol Boosted Pool
    • Economic feasibility study
    • Possible development/review of wrappers
  • Small-scope engineering services
    • As needed
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