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
veBALcontract, 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: