Orb Collective September 2022 Update

Service Providers Orb Collective
1

Now that we’re approaching the end of Orb’s second month since launch, it’s my pleasure to provide a community update on behalf of our team.

Vision & Roadmap
In last month’s update, I shared the ecosystem-wide goals for Balancer that Orb has identified and championed for Q3- Q4 2022:

Short-term

1. Strengthen the DAO’s financial position.
2. Make Balancer easier to use.

Mid-term

1. Scale Boosted Pools and veBAL.
2. Expand Balancer to Gnosis Chain and zkSync.

Long-term

1. Develop and launch Managed Pools use cases.

In driving forward this vision of Balancer’s top priorities, we have organized and led:

  • Q4 project brainstorming session with participation of 25 contributors from Orb Collective, Balancer Labs, Balancer OpCo, Balancer Foundation, and Balancer Maxis.
  • Framework for project proposals that was inclusive of all core team contributors – 27 proposals were submitted
  • Proposal peer review & feedback process (in progress)
  • Estimation of capacity per team for Q4 (in progress)

Next steps:

  • Finalization of proposals
  • Q3 retrospective analysis
  • Q4 roadmap setting

Personnel
As mentioned in our first community update, strengthening the Integrations team’s technical resources continued to be an area of focus on the personnel side. This month, we conducted thorough interviews that progressed into the final stages for an integrations engineering role and we should have an official update for you on that soon.

This month, I’d like to present our team-specific updates grouped according the Balancer ecosystem’s current goals, in order to more clearly show how our work ties directly to Balancer’s highest priority objectives.

1. Strengthen the DAO’s financial position.

DESIGN

  • Designed some exploratory UI to show users which pools contribute to Protocol Revenue.
    • Includes designs for a new pool leaderboard by protocol revenue contributions, a new section on pool pages to show exact protocol revenue contributions, and also highlighting this within the veBAL vote gauge table.

PARTNERSHIPS

  • Fully closed the OlympusDAO Liquidity Migration Deal
    • ~$50M+ of Liquidity Migrated from Sushi
    • Top 2 Pool on Balancer by Fees Collected
    • Additional Product Launches to come with OlympusDAO
  • Opened conversations with various Market Makers and DeFi native arbitrageurs to explore ways to have them utilize Balancer more (and thus bring more fees)
  • Explored new chains Balancer could launch LBP’s on to generate more fees for the DAO

2. Make Balancer easier to use.

DESIGN

  • UX improvements to the Trade preview screen, which enable people to preview trades without connecting their wallet
  • WIP copy changes across the website, for better and more transparent messaging

INTEGRATIONS

  • Code reviews for partner developers
  • Paladin finance rateProvider
  • DAOism rev share
  • Creating standardized process for Certora audits for partners

PARTNERSHIPS

  • Continued to work with the Grants Team to review the MultiFarm veBAL Dashboard that is currently in production

MARKETING

  • Podcast- highlights partners who are using Balancer Protocol in different ways with the goal to show other projects in the space use cases of our code.
  • Articles- Benefits of Multi-token Pools, Balancer Leads the Yield Bearing Token Revolution
  • MetaStable Pools video- explains metastable pools and the features
  • Knowledge Center- highlights specific use cases in developer documentation, creating a resource which should help our docs become easier to understand and use.
  • Ambassador Program- Welcome communities in countries where English is not widely spoken through translating documentation and creating new pieces of content that will be shaped for the relevant audience. Goes public Q4.

3. Scale Boosted Pools and veBAL.

DESIGN

  • Designed a flow to enable users to vote on multiple pool gauges in a single transaction (instead of one vote per transaction)
  • Some UX improvements around warning messages for when vote-capped pool gauges exceed the cap

PARTNERSHIPS

  • Continued to work with the 12+ partners interested in Boosted Pools and received interest from another 2-3 partners looking to develop their own Boosted Pool once ready to launch
  • Opened conversation with two of the largest players in DeFi and received interest in them owning either a larger veBAL stack or making their own purchase(s)

MARKETING

4. Expand Balancer to Gnosis Chain and zkSync.

DESIGN

  • UX/UI work around better network mismatch errors, which become more common as more networks are added to Balancer

PARTNERSHIPS

  • Started conversations with Kapartkey (GnosisDAO Treasury Active Manager and primary incentive manager for Gnosis Chain) to start setting up connections and projects when we launch on GC
  • Performed full scale analysis of Gnosis Chain and started to reach out to projects for partnership on launch

5. Develop and launch Managed Pools use cases.

DESIGN

  • Product management of the launch including planning, roadmap and features
  • UX/UI design around specific Managed Pool features, especially on the Pool pages with new items like a Management history changelog
  • Working with Index Coop around the first partner launch, for Diversified Staked ETH (dsETH)
  • Liaised with HAL.xyz for opt-in Managed Pool notifications for LPs. HAL has provided a proposal, now being considered for a grant

INTEGRATIONS

  • Finalized technical design for Controller
  • Circuit Breaker revamp: switching to more robust algorithm and running simulations
  • Finalized swap fee splits with launch partner IndexCoop

PARTNERSHIPS

  • Started preliminary pitches for additional DeFi ETF projects on the value of Managed Pools (one planning call and potential GTM after the Index Coop launch)

Admin/Ops

MARKETING

  • DevCon planning

ECOSYSTEM OPS

  • We had our very first ecosystem All Hands this month. The goal of these is to share updates on cross-entity/SP projects and create time for live Q&A. Some of the topics we covered were our Bogotá ONsite, Managed Pools and Communications Hygiene. It’s important that attendees feel like this is a good use of time so we sent out a survey asking for feedback. Overall the sentiment was positive and we received 40% participation. We’ll continue to iterate on the structure of these to find what works best.
  • Our first ecosystem ONsite in Bogotá is less than two weeks away! The goals of our ecosystem ONsites are to bond IRL and create experiences that aren’t replicable in the metaverse. We have 30 attendees across BLabs, Balancer Maxis, The Foundation & Orb Collective. We’ve been heads down planning out our three-day agenda that will be a mix of shared meals, activities and working sessions.

Big thanks to the whole Orb team for another highly productive month. We’re excited to continue our forward momentum in the coming month as we kick off Q4.

4 Likes