[Proposal] Allowlist Aura Finance in Balancer VotingEscrow

Governance General Proposal
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Summary

This proposal is to whitelist Aura Finance in Balancer’s VotingEscrow contract allowing Aura Finance to lock BAL (in the form of 80/20 BAL/WETH BPT), participate in Balancer governance, and provide additional rewards to Balancer ecosystem participants without immediate disposal of BAL rewards.

Abstract

Aura Finance is a protocol built on top of the Balancer system to provide maximum incentives to Balancer LPs and BAL stakers through social aggregation of $BAL deposits and Aura’s native token $AURA .

For BAL stakers, Aura provides a seamless onboarding process to veBAL , by creating a tokenised wrapper token called auraBAL that represents the 80/20 BPT locked up for the maximum time in VotingEscrow. This can be staked to receive existing rewards ( $BAL and bbaUSD revenue) from Balancer, in addition to Aura system revenue in the form of $BAL , and additional $AURA . Users can trade their auraBAL back to BAL at any time through a deep StablePool BPT.

For Liquidity providers, Aura abstracts away complexity of the Balancer gauge boosting system, providing a smooth onboarding process to all Balancer gauge deposits. Aura allows depositors to achieve a high boost through the protocol owned veBAL while also accumulating additional $AURA rewards.

BAL locked in Aura will be taken out of circulation “Ad vitam æternam”. Being aligned with the DAO is our goal, with this implementation seeking to be fully symbiotic.

$AURA & Governance

Aura Finance also proposes the $AURA token to act as a governance and incentivisation tool within the ecosystem. Locked AURA tokens will have governance rights in the system and will be able to vote using the protocol owned veBAL voting power. The goal of $AURA is to create a flourishing ecosystem on top of Balancer.

With great power comes great responsibility… The protocol is expected to control a large stake of the veBAL voting power. This has a huge economic power as it effectively controls the flow of Balancer incentives over the next 20 years. It is therefore important that this control is fully decentralized. Aura has added vote delegation to the system to allow this to take place fully on chain. Once the voter base has sufficiently matured, control will be passed from the starting 4 of 7 multisig, to a suite of on chain contracts.

The Aura Voting contract has support for EIP1271 meaning that the results of on chain votes can be forwarded to Snapshot to participate in Balancer governance. This transition should take place as soon as the Aura voting contracts are battle tested and the voter base has matured (~3-4 months post launch).

Amuse Bouche - Without giving too much details, here is a quick overview of high level AURA distribution:

  • 50% Balancer LP rewards Rewarded pro-rata for BAL received on Aura
  • 10% for StableSwap auraBAL/BPT over 4 years
  • 5% for Aura/ETH incentives
  • 17.5% Treasury vested
  • 2.5% bootstrapping token holder base*
  • 1% for future incentives
  • 2% BAL treasury over 2 years
  • 2% system bootstrapping incentives
  • 10% for the Aura team over 2 years
  • 100% Fair launched no VC - Seed investors

*Voting positively on the allowlist proposal will have an additional 2-3x boost in the bootstrapping phase based on their BAL balance

The release schedule for AURA is thus depicted as follows:

auradistro

Team

The Aura team comprises DeFi builders and pioneers with a track record of delivering.

Aura Finance is currently undergoing an audit with Peckshield, and is planning to conduct two further audits with top tier firms.

Proposal specification

It is proposed that the Balancer multisig add a smart wallet checker on the veBAL contract, and subsequently whitelist the depositor contract provided by Aura Finance following a successful proposal. The Balancer team would manually review this contract before whitelisting.

In the interests of keeping Aura 100% fair launch and with no VCs, it is also proposed that the Balancer treasury DAO provide the Aura treasury with a $300k grant in order to reimburse for audit costs and to be spent on further security (e.g. codearena).

SPEC

Allowlist the following contract on the veBAL smart_wallet_checker once available: 0xaf52695e1bb01a16d33d7194c28c42b10e0dbec2

Links

https://www.aura.finance
Twitter

50 Likes
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Nice to see you here @0xMaki !

I support this proposal

6 Likes
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its interesting, this is a flywheel for balancer

6 Likes
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  • 0.5% to voters of our proposal (allowlisting)

where can we vote? :]

4 Likes
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Never been more excited about the future of Balancer than right now!

This takes everything to the next level

7 Likes
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This is the way
Hope it passes

3 Likes
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Nice… Balancer’s can certainly use a battle tested logic lego.

3 Likes
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Glad to see our old friend, 0xMaki, here. :wave:
As this is fair launch, no VC, built on Balancer, and lead by famous and experienced DeFi developer.

I truly support this proposal and wish it could pass.

4 Likes
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Excited about this proposal as a mechanism to help strengthen the Balancer ecosystem! Thanks @0xMaki :muscle:

2 Likes
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Very excited to see this proposal!

One thing that does raise some concerns for me is this passage:

It is proposed that the Balancer multisig add a smart wallet checker on the veBAL contract, and subsequently whitelist the depositor contract provided by Aura Finance following a successful proposal. The Balancer team would manually review this contract before whitelisting.

This may not be the intention but I’d like to caution against bringing a Snapshot vote for making additions to the allowlist before the relevant contracts have been open sourced and deployed. Many BAL holders will be very excited for protocols such as Aura to be built on top of Balancer but we must make sure they all get proper scrutiny before being approved by governance.

Aura-like systems will have huge impacts on the Balancer ecosystem (just as Convex has a large impact on Curve) and so it’s the responsibility of the entire Balancer community to carefully weigh up the results of granting a particular protocol the power to lock veBAL.

While the Balancer Labs team can advise on potential security/technical issues or ways to improve forwards compatibility with Balancer’s roadmap, I don’t think it’s right for us to be the only community members to be responsible (or able) to scrutinise a concrete implementation of Aura or any similar protocol. Balancer governance should make it’s decision when it is in full possession of the facts on what it’s voting on.

Not to mention reliance solely on the Balancer Labs team potentially puts us in the awkward position of having to push back against a completed governance vote after the fact if irreconcilable issues with the code arise.

We have good precedent in the case of Curve that additions to the allowlist should only be put to a vote after the contracts are deployed:

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I am excited about this proposal!

I would agree with @TomFrench that it would be right not to create a dependency around Balancer Labs if we can resolve that, I’m 100% in favor.

4 Likes
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I’d echo the sentiment of others before me, super excited to see this proposal. Introducing these additional layers on top of veBAL is great to see and having it come together so quickly after the launch of veBAL is awesome. Adding building blocks such as this to the Balancer ecosystem will add rocket fuel to BALbattles.

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yess Maki THIS IS THE WHEY

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Very cool, let . This . Paaaass

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Yes! Very excited about this proposal! Hope it passes :+1:

1 Like
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Vooote yes to @0xMaki

1 Like
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Supporting this proposal is a no-brainer.

@0xMaki needs no recommendations and has repeatedly demonstrated his ability to execute and deliver.

Also, huge shout-out to the Balancer team and community. I enjoyed every minute I have spend on their Discord.

4 Likes
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Vote yes. Wgmi tyvm🤝

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I support the Bal meta

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The Aura team’s ability to deliver plus the depth of 0xMaki’s network and aligned partners (Layerzero, Redacted, etc.) will bring a great deal of value to the Balancer protocol.

Challenges going forward revolve around onboarding the right protocols to keep the flywheel going and establishing a clear communication plan to convey the advantages of the Balancer ecosystem over legacy models.

In short, I fully support this proposal and will be voting in favor when it moves to Snapshot and vote. I’d love to be a part of this adventure!

6 Likes