Vision
Pickle Finance aims to become the home for Balancer LPs to enjoy the best possible returns and to become a major collaborator in the governance of the Balancer Protocol.
Abstract
Pickle is building a module on top of Balancer’s Gauge system that seeks to aid Balancer LPs and prospective veBAL participants in maximising the utility of their deposits with Balancer, while also enhancing the overall utility of the Balancer’s Gauge system by creating a liquid veBAL derivative.
Similar to other “boosting protocols”, Pickle aims to create these synergies by providing an easy mechanism for the aggregation of veBAL boosts and for prospective Balancer LPs to benefit from this boost.
The Pickle and Balancer teams are no strangers to each other, with Pickle being invited and expressing its willingness to join the Balancer Wars as early as the Gauge system was announced. Pickle has borrowed from its unique experience running a Gauge system for itself and building on top of other boosting modules like Convex to come up with a unique system we call the Brinery.
As a gesture of goodwill and to encourage the creation and adoption of the Balancer Brinery, Pickle will be providing incentives (in $PICKLE tokens) to both those who vote to whitelist us and those who join the Brinery early on. These incentives will be detailed pending their approval by Pickle governance. The Balancer community can expect the Pickle Core team to propose between 2-3% of the PICKLE supply to be awarded to Balancer Brinery incentives, with rougly 80% of these reserved for joiners and 20% for voters.
This proposal makes no request to the Balancer community for financial assistance to Pickle. We are a solvent, revenue-generating protocol with a healthy balance sheet. Our interest is in providing a superior service to Balancer users and to create a symbiotic relationship between our communities.
Brinery Specification: Architecture & Design
The Brinery will provide a seamless experience for users to join veBAL. Our proposed system works in the following manner:
- Users deposit 80/20 BAL/ETH
BPTwith Pickle - Users receive brinBAL in return
- Under the hood, Pickle will:
a) Lock up a portion ofBAL/ETHforveBALin perpetuity - a receipt token is issued for the locked amount as pveBAL. A portion ofBAL/ETHliquidity is retained
b) SupplypveBALand retainedBAL/ETHinto a new Balancer pool - Users can redeem
brinBALfor their proportionate share ofpveBALandBAL/ETH(or in a single asset if they wish)
This design has the advantage of guaranteeing liquidity for Pickle’s veBAL derivative. The Brinery contracts will have flexibility in managing liquidity to achieve the proper balance between liquidity and maximal rewards. Users who hold brinBAL will receive Balancer governance rewards (all fee-sharing rewards, emissions, and bribe proceeds will be consolidated into BAL tokens), the Brinery’s “flywheel” rewards (BAL “taxed” from Brinery boosted PickleJars), and of course PICKLE tokens.
For users familiar with our standard PickleJar, a series of Brinery Boosted Jars, or “brinJars”, will be on offer to compound users’ BPT positions, taking advantage of boosted rewards from the Brinery’s veBAL lock, alongside PICKLE incentives. These novel Balancer Jars will rely on state-of-the-art infrastructure and comply with the EIP-4626 standard for maximal efficiency, security, and composability.
Pickle
History
Pickle is one of the original yield aggregators in DeFi, bringing innovations such as incentivised auto-farming with its PickleJars. We have been building as an Ethereum-based DAO since September 2020. Our builders are well-known and have collaborated over their time in DeFi with many top-notch protocols and teams to build, conduct security reviews, or brainstorm and validate ideas. To name a few: Yearn, Sushi, Curve, Polygon, Frax, Alchemix, and of course, Balancer.
Pickle has crossed paths with Balancer on several occasions. Pickle was the first yield aggregator to build on top of Balancer on its launch in Polygon. Moreover, our PICKLE-ETH was only the second pool after BAL-ETH to launch with Balancer on Arbitrum. A cursory look at the BAL mining scripts on GitHub shows we are 1 of 11 Balancer partners. On Arbitrum, we are 1 of 3. We are brethren in DeFi and hope to remain so for many years to come.
Finally, Pickle was the first-ever protocol to adapt Curve’s Gauge system to align its users and token holders into a better governance system we call DILL. More than 51% of all PICKLE is currently locked for an average of 3.23 years, with almost 1,000 DILL holders forming the DAO that backs our protocol.
Team
Pickle is led by myself, joined by the rest of the core team which currently consists of another 12 individuals with a wide range of skills in product, product marketing, UX design, smart contracts engineering, and frontend and Web3 infrastructure development.
Governance
Pickle is run according to the principle of “progressive decentralisation” by the DILL DAO. DILL governance is currently upgrading so DILL holders receive 100% of protocol revenues generated by Pickle, in ETH, plus PICKLE anti-dilutive rewards. At present, using Pickle’s Gauge system, DILL holders can vote on-chain for where PICKLE emissions should go. With support for delegation currently in development, Pickle aims to launch its own “Pickle voting module” so users can participate in governance, including PICKLE emission allocations across sidechains, via secure offchain voting.
The Pickle voting module to provide DILL holders an interface for directing veBAL voting power held by Pickle’s Balancer Brinery, as well as select the allocation of PICKLE emissions amongst our various Brinery products.
Specification
If this vote passes, the Balancer DAO Multisig eth:0x10A19e7eE7d7F8a52822f6817de8ea18204F2e4f will initiate a transaction with 0x7869296Efd0a76872fEE62A058C8fBca5c1c826C calling the function allowlistAddress with the argument 0x93318d4b44558f57B688C6943fA9E2c3e52540B0
