Proposal for Symmetric to manage Gnosis Deployment as Friendly Fork of Balancer

Governance
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Proposal for Symmetric to manage Gnosis Deployment as Friendly Fork of Balancer

Preface:

The team at Symmetric Finance fully understands there is a current agreement to launch Balancer on Gnosis Chain. We intend this initial proposal as a starting point towards a collaborative relationship to mutually benefit each protocol. We look forward to discussing it with the Balancer community.

Purpose:

Fully expand the Balancer model to Gnosis with all included and specified tech needed by Gnosis and Balancer, managed by Symmetric Finance. Recognize Symmetric Finance as the Official Friendly Fork of the Gnosis chain and expand the veBAL model to Gnosis leveraging existing tech and branding of Symmetric alongside Balancer. Continue to explore and build new use cases for Balancer Tech, especially Managed, Liquidity Bootstrapping, and Boosted pools.

Quick Summary

We believe in the friendly fork model and aim to share economics, knowledge, and network with the BalancerDAO.

We are experienced with the Balancer protocol, having successfully run a Balancer V1 fork on two chains for over 12 months, and a v2 fork for 3 months.

Being an early builder in the xDAI (now Gnosis) ecosystem we are considered a “Chain native project” on Gnosis. We have strong relationships with builders and the wider community.

We propose Symmetric becomes the official friendly fork of Gnosis Chain.

Project Team

SymmetricDAO is a diverse and committed community that launched Symmetric Finance, a fork of Balancer V1.0, in June of 2021 on Gnosis Chain (then xDAI) and Celo in October 2021. The core team consists of the 3 project founders (2 Engineers and a Business Development Lead), a director of ecosystem/partnerships, and a marketer. Developers and other SymmetricDAO contributors support the core team. Our primary governance mechanism is Moloch V2.0 on Gnosis Chain, through which the Symm stakeholders align on initiatives by the DAO.

Introduction:

Hey everyone! It’s your friends at Symmetric Finance again, back for another (more modest) try at building a collaborative and mutually beneficial relationship with the Balancer crew. We have taken feedback to heart after our first proposal and watched as the Friendly Fork model developed. We are here for another try, welcome your feedback, and hope we can find a way forward that builds a solid relationship for the future of both our communities.

Symmetric has run a Balancer v1 fork on Gnosis chain since June 2021. Mid-June of 2022, Symmetric went live with its V2 deployment on Celo and Gnosis Chian. Over the past months Symmetric has grown it’s presence on Gnosis chain and is eager to continue and expand our longstanding place in the Gnosis Community as a partner with Balancer.

Motivation

Gnosis chain has a promising future and a clear and useful niche in the works as a compliment to Eth 2.0. As a developer friendly and innovation centered chain, Gnosis Chain can act as an innovation hub and a space for creators and developers to flourish. It is ripe for relatively fast growth buoyed by strong industry relationships and a clear vision to advance alongside Ethereum post-merge…

Inspired by the success of the Beethoven and Balancer’s work on Optimism so far, Symmetric offers a friendly fork agreement to BalancerDAO to partner with Symmetric to make the Balancer model the top defi protocol on Gnosis Chain and cement this spot for the future.

We have exciting plans for the future of Gnosis Chain and we would love to leverage both our communities to maximize this potential. With this support, we see Symmetric as the future flagship DEX of Gnosis and a hub for defi activity on what is a burgeoning chain.

A Vision for Symmetric and Gnosis

Like the burgeoning relationship between Gnosis and Ethereum, Symmetric sees the Balancer-Symmetric partnership as a place to build upon the promise of Balancer v2 tech in the developer friendly environment that Gnosis offers…Symmetric looks to leverage Balancer tech in new and innovative ways starting with Liquidity Bootstrapping Pools and Managed Pools. Symmetric has already built relationships ready to leverage these innovations and together with Balancer can help build new use cases that can benefit both communities.

Further Details

To get the most out of the Friendly fork, both DAOs also agree to:

Co-marketing

To ensure both entities will profit from each other’s reach and marketing or sales activities, we will do co-branded communication & services where applicable.
Knowledge and research sharing

To share the latest technical insights about the Balancer protocol and collaborate on a joint ecosystemic technical roadmap. The DAOs will also support each other when collectively engaging third parties for mutual benefits.

Friendly Fork Agreement
If accepted by the Governance process of both DAOs, this friendly fork will start effective immediately. There is no expiry date to the agreement; however, both DAOs can override this Friendly Fork agreement through their governance process to remove the Friendly Fork title and rides with a one-month notice period.

Specifications

If this proposal is accepted, Symmetric will become the official and sole Friendly Fork of Balancer on Gnosis Chain, operating the full suite of Balancer tech in close concert with the Balancer and Gnosis communities.

Symmetric proposes the following financial and incentives arrangement:

Proposed swap fee structure: 50% Protocols (Split evenly between Symmetric and Balancer) - 50% LP provider

Symmetric is setting aside its full Gnosis-side rewards emissions for pool rewards and bribes to veBAL holders to incentivize veBAL holders into core pools on Symmetric. This currently amounts to 947 SYMM tokens per week, but varies based on chain TVL and would be expected to rise based on a confirmed partnership.

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Welcome back guys,

Nice to see Symmetric coming back strong with a solid proposal!

I’m in favour of enhancing the Balancer contributor base and I see Symmetric as a building block of the multichain strategy Balancer should adopt!

Lets bring Balancer tech to Gnosis with this partnership.

Full support!

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Thanks for coming back. Having Symmetric as a friendly fork on gc seems the right way to go to me. No need for a second balancer deployment when a v2 clone is already in place and working well.

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I’ve had a question asking if we would consider “Balancer managed by Symmetric” or similar branding. The answer is yes, we’d consider any branding suggestions that leverage Balancer’s fantastic brand recognition and Symmetric’s deep relationships on Gnosis chain.

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I am happy to see Symmetric making continuous progress despite the challenging market conditions.
In the very near future, Symmetric will be the star of DeFi.
You are on the right choice and path. Symmetric :handshake: Balancer! LFG!

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Great to see you guys. We weren’t participating in Balancer when you previously presented your FF proposal, so after gathering some context, here are a few thoughts.

It’s great to see that you have a live product. The proposal looks much leaner than the previous one and more mutually beneficial. It would be ideal to clarify a couple of things like your metrics on your V1 & V2 and expand on your expectations for co-marketing - x amount of services per month?

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Bullish on Gnosis Chain and looking forward to seeing Balancer on there! Looks like Symmetric are super capable and would be able to technically manage any ongoing deployment.

However it seems like this might not be the best move economically for Balancer or Gnosis. With the SYMM token being already established and trading at ~800k FDV, it could be hard to generate native incentives for the ecosystem and thus would rely on veBAL gauges. In terms of revenue for veBAL, having the proposed fee structure of “50% Protocols (Split evenly between Symmetric and Balancer) - 50% LP provider” could have a negative effect on the overall system, whereas normally 37.5% would end up going to veBAL or core pools.

Noticed in the Orb strategy update that @immutbl mentioned a potential Gnosis chain deployment was in the pipeline. Would be interested to know if the core Balancer units were thinking about doing this any time soon, @Fernando maybe you can comment on that?

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@0xMaha Thanks for your comments, I think these are all things we’d be open to discussing, and we’d be happy to discuss any and all options for collaboration. If that isn’t an option we will move forward.

We very much understand that the core veBAL pools are the focus, and would be happy to incentivize those in ways that make most sense to the Balancer community.

@Bobbay_StableLab
We currently have a bit under 3 million in TVL on v2. Our biggest pools are GNO pools and these currently generate the most fees by a long shot. Our current fee split is 40% to the protocol. We’re currently waiting on the a 1-inch integration (they integrated v1).

We are supported by chain based incentives as well, with GNO rewards. These are farmed currently but we’d obviously adopt Balancer’s system if this were to move forward. We’ve been waiting to deploy boosted pools, and will eventually do so on Celo and have plans for Gnosis as well. We’ve also got plans to launch LBPs and make creative use of Managed Pools as well.

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Would be sweet to hear from @solarcurve and other important folks from Balancer and Gnosis as well. We want this to be at least as beneficial to Balancer as it is to us. We believe our collaboration makes the most sense to both communities. Decentralization in the true spirit of crypto, as well as more efficient.

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I haven’t commented because I don’t know if I have any useful comments to make really. I respect that symmetric has been on gnosis a long time, spent the work on integrating v2, etc. There may have been a window for an FF style arrangement on Gnosis but in my mind that time has passed.

947 SYMM per week is not enough to secure even one pool emissions via Aura bribing (they have 0.5% voting minimum). Gnosis can always subsidize this but the other factor is Gnosis itself has quite a bit of voting power. If Balancer runs the Gnosis deployment we keep 100% of the fees their voting power will generate. What’s the case for giving Symmetric 50%?

If there was a reason to think you’d have boosted pools out quickly or had a pile of your own money to spend on voters that might tip the scales in your favor.

Not to mention that doing this agreement would likely force a migration of all your TVL over to the canonical Balancer deployment that Balancer governance would control. You’d have to use our gauge system which has many nuances you’d need to become familiar with. Many aspects of our operations are different than yours, all of which will require time on our part to help you with.

I am also biased as I do like BeethovenX and have worked with them for a long time now. I guess you modeled this agreement on that one. The difference is they did a ton of boosted pool work, you just got v2 out the door. They have significantly more financial resources than you do (not your fault). Delays on pool factory development meant things didn’t go exactly as planned since we’re now in waiting mode on Optimism but the idea of getting there early and securing our incentives package did work out. I think having a dedicated team working on boosted pools & integrations will set us apart there once development work by Balancer Labs is finished. We’ll see anyway.

The last thing I want is to be negative here. One can say I maybe should not have commented at all really but you asked. Personally I favor waiting until Balancer deploys to Gnosis themselves as I don’t think there’s a rush to secure a position there really. I’m completely open to working with symmetric in a positive sum way - just need to figure out how that could work exactly.

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I appreciate that point of view, @solarcurve . Thanks for sharing. I hope we can find a way forward as well, whatever that looks like.

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We are also bullish on Gnosis Chain and looking forward to having Balancer on it.

As I mentioned in a post in the past, the frontend team (which is leaving BLabs and going to work for Balancer OpCo) has been working a lot on more easily supporting other chains on their UI. This has been especially targeted in the short term for Gnosis Chain and ZkSync.

That said I appreciate the willingness of @wdude and the Symmetric team to keep collaborating in any other ways possible, I hope we can find some good ones!

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Thank you, @Fernando . We too are bullish on Gnosis Chain. I sincerely hope we can work together to keep building it.

At this point it seems clear that moving this proposal forward to Snapshot could be counterproductive to a collaborative relationship, and that is what Symmetric has been trying to build with Balancer and has built with the two blockchains we are part of.

We will continue to look for ways to work together and hope as you launch on Gnosis that the Balancer community will do the same. We also hope to look for a way to collaborate on Celo chain as we are a big part of building out a refi ecosystem. We’d hope for a line of open communication with the Balancer Community and leadership.

Onward and upward friends,
Wdude

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