[Proposal] Fund BalancerDAO for Q2 2022

This is a proposal by the Ops subDAO, specifically Solarcurve, Mog, and mkflow.

Introduction

There are many accomplishments that all contributors to BalancerDAO can be proud of as we look back on the first quarter. These will be detailed throughout this post as we hear the following from each subDAO/working group:

  • Budget Accounting
  • Successes
  • Learnings
  • KPI(s) for the second quarter

Please bring any questions to the monthly DAO update on March 30th at 12pm EST in Balancer’s discord. We will discuss this proposal in depth and address any community feedback.

Key resources:

Q1 Budget

Q2 Budget

February Compensation

March Compensation

Compensation

As we enter the second quarter we will be operating under the new framework recently approved through a governance vote. This makes estimating compensation quite difficult as there is a large amount of flexibility built in. As of March, we have 17 contributors on a fixed salary. If we estimate half of them will take the maximum compensation per month in stables ($5,000) and half will take the maximum in max locked veBAL ($10,000 in BAL), we arrive at an estimate of $127,500 in stables and 21,250 BAL (at $12 BAL).

It is possible we will have to request supplementary funding from the treasury if this estimate proves to be too conservative but for now we feel it is a reasonably educated guess.

Ops

Budget

Ops had two line items on the Q1 Budget - “People Design House (TPDH)” for 300 BAL and “Backup Allocation” for 1000 BAL. TPDH was paid the full 300 BAL in exchange for consulting on onboarding, offboarding, and performance review methods. The “Backup Allocation” was fully exhausted aside from 22 BAL as follows:

50 BAL towards paying for Gitbook (Community Dev working group)
330 BAL to Play Branding Agency (DAO’s share of the rebrand cost, led by Balancer Labs)
598 BAL for sponsoring the DAOist event in Amsterdam in mid April (request of the Marketing subDAO)

Looking ahead to Q2, we estimate the following line items:

5,000 BAL - Governance Multisig Stipends (per this vote)
1,200 BAL - People Design House (300 BAL per month to continue Operation consulting across recruiting, conflict resolution, onboarding strategy and DAO Alumni strategy
300 BAL - People Design House payment for March
12,000 BAL - Coordinape (4,000 BAL per month)
1,000 BAL and $20,000 in stables - Backup Allocation (Conference attendance, ad-hoc DAO expenditures, compensation, other unforeseen costs)

Successes

  • First quarter of Coordinape saw 4,000 BAL over February and March distributed across 19 DAO contributors
  • The People Design House (TPDH) executed on contributor accountability and offboarding process design
  • Created a Code of Conduct, overhauled compensation, started covering Conference Attendance for contributors (and ensuring funding is included in budget)
  • Onboarding process created and v1 implemented
  • Executed the first budgeting period (Feb - March), including budget development/spend/reporting

Learnings

  • Ops to increase amount of ‘Backup Allocation’ to account for a wider range of spending occurrences
  • More focus on ways to promote a positive work environment and reduce interpersonal conflict
  • We now have a clear onboarding process but there is still more work to do to smooth the way for new contributors easily joining the DAO. The insights:
    • New contributors expect the onboarding workflow to be part of their Discord experience.
    • New contributors expect a person to guide them through the DAO. An explainer on how to contribute does not seem sufficient.
    • New contributors do not read all the material on the onboarding section. This means the DAO could find new formats to distribute the information
    • New contributors expect work to be assigned to them at first as they do not have all the context available to make them confident that their idea is what the DAO needs.

Q2 KPI(s)

  • at least 75% positive responses to the monthly health check
  • at least 90% active participation on Coordinape (90% of eligible contributors allocate some amount of GIVE)
  • Onboarding at least two new contributors who receive some form of compensation
  • Developing a clear conflict resolution workflow and upskilling of DAO members

Grants

Budget

Grants is requesting an additional allocation of 46,425 BAL to ensure operations can smoothly continue into Q2.

Successes

  • Approved $421,000 in grants to around 20 grantees
  • To continue building out the Balancer ecosystem in a constructive way we wanted to look towards new ways of sourcing quality applications. Wave 3 was only 2 months long (to get in line with the rest of the subDAO cycles), but quite some work has been done on this front.

Inhouse comparative research has brought up potential leads for promising grantees.

A grant is live in which research is being done into how the program could manifest itself more effectively in the right circles. Finding more use cases and projects who would benefit from building on top of Balancer V2.

Balancer grants is about to work together with a well known DAO to collaborate on grants! This will bring in a lot more applications for our program. Details will be announced soon.

Talks with an accelerator are happening as well. If successful, this would help our grantees in growing and bringing bigger and better value to the Balancer ecosystem. Plus it would be yet another funnel bringing in more qualified and relevant leads for the Balancer grants program.

Learnings

  • We have (sadly) had to implement some structure around stale grantees. Going into the 4th Wave it is clear that some grants do not complete. This was always expected to happen and to be honest, we feel quite relieved it only happened after 8 months. And only with two smaller grantees out of 25 grantees in total!

If a grantee has ignored committee messages for 6 weeks, we consider the grant stale. To make sure we do not have endless clutter within our pipeline, this would be the moment to take it out of our projected budget and weekly/monthly updates.

To prevent situations like the above from happening, the grant lead asks mentors to do monthly update calls with teams and keep a finger on the pulse by having weekly telegram updates. If however it does occur, the mentor/grant lead will give the grantee a warning after 4 weeks and reminder after 5. After the deadline has crossed and no further contact has been established, the grantee gets removed from the live grantees within the internal documentation and also from the live grantee page.

If a grantee re-emerges and shows signs of wanting to continue their grant after it got declared ‘stale’, the grantee will have to resubmit a grant application. This will minimize the grant committee wasting too much time on slacking projects. The Balancer DAO is handing out BAL to these projects after all!

Q2 KPI(s)

Hard to do with Grants, however, we pledge to deliver a Final Report with data and learnings, both internal and from feedback of the grantees plus share our success rate of grantees.

Partnerships

Budget

Partnerships had two line items for Q1 - 415 BAL for two potential Junior Biz Dev hires and 250 BAL for Misc expenses. Only 100 BAL was paid to Cosme Fulanito for some analysis work on Liquidity Mining. For Q2, Partnerships is not requesting any additional budget beyond compensation.

Successes

  • Yearly Partnership with BanklessDAO through LM program, which is meant to leverage the high user base for marketing and general visibility (State of the DAO newsletter) (Q2 will focus around veBAL)
  • Curated Overnight’s USD+ on Polygon boosted pool (still on the final development phase)
  • Won over the strong QuickSwap & Sushi competition for Matic liquid staking on Polygon; projected liquidity over 200M$
  • Curated, brought to the Community and finally approved the Hexagon Dex on Avalanche.
  • Built the “partnership Flowchart” accessible here.
  • Developed the Balancer Friendly Fork Framework

Liquidity Mining Committee

  • Increased general efficiency for LM distribution;
  • Strategic Partners are now connected through Partnership;
  • Introduced the “90 days incentive program”
  • Introduced the “Rising Star” program
  • Introduced a new Standard Operating Procedure for double incentives programs (Multisig wallet seeding)
  • “Cosme Fulanito” produced a weekly report for LM efficiency;

Learnings

We initially requested two interns dedicated to the subDAO, ideally these roles were supposed to alleviate some workload on the Team. Existing Ballers partially covered these roles well at the start but lack of structure/process reduced the ability of tasks to be easily delegated to these new members of the subDAO. Their time was therefore absorbed by existing roles within the DAO. Dedicated partnership members are therefore the preferred path forward.

Q2 KPI(s)

  • Create a full budget for new team
  • Hire 2 x Junior Biz Devs

Plan for Q2

  • Taking care and maintaining existing DAO partnerships, LM engagements and launched FF, through the hiring of 2 x Junior Biz Dev
  • Defining, curating and hiring a DAO integrations/ technical BD
  • Sync up and collaborate with Balancer ecosystem team ( Blabs, GEC,Foundation)
  • Idea of continuing to focus on “Ecosystem”
  • Deepen some existing relationships
  • Hoping for Core Dev Team to deliver “Managed Pools” so to explore good partnership with leading Index teams in the DeFi ecosystem and consider an inhouse product called “Balancer Indexes”
  • Focus on the creation of the “Balancer DAO dApp”: this, in principle, would see the collaboration of Partnership subDAO and Dev subDAO.

Treasury

Budget

There was no budget requested for Q1 and no budget requested for Q2, outside of compensation.

Successes

  • Passed the Fei Trubo proposal, collaborated with Fei on a BPT Fuse pool (borrowing against BPT’s)
  • Coordinating with Messari for the quarterly report
  • Created revenue projections and balance sheet in a google spreadsheet (zekraken)
  • Passed the proposal to invest protocol fees for the DAO

Learnings:

  • Planning was underway for work on the quarterly financial report, then the Messari proposal went to a vote and passed. This forced a change of plans and caused some work to be wasted.
  • Didn’t focus enough on process creation - most decisions today are made ad-hoc

Q2 KPI(s)

  • Flesh out an investment framework for the DAO’s assets (how to measure risk appetite)
    • Return benchmarks
    • Use Balancer and/or external protocols
    • Build out processes around how these decisions are made

Marketing

Budget

For Q1 500 BAL was allocated towards a “Community Video Competition”. Of this, 364 BAL has been paid out.

For Q2 a total budget of $24,000 in stablecoins is being requested for the following:

  • $5,000 for Spaghetti.eth in Milan
  • $10,000 for another round of bounties/competitions
  • $3,000 for sponsored articles in Chinese crypto media
  • $6,000 for miscellaneous campaigns

Successes

  • started our first campaign with video bounties
  • more structured workflow and plans within the marketing subDAO

Learnings

We have learned that in general we always achieve better results when our comms is clear and tidy - in particular:

  • We need to push more campaigns and diversify, and be more ordered in what we publish (e.g. coordinating with Blabs)
  • We need to find a one-place for communicating with the public as BalancerDAO (could be Twitter or one Discord chat)

Q2 KPI(s)

  • Sponsor at least 2 relevant physical crypto events in Q2.
  • Hold at least 5 AMAs per month during Q2.
  • Grow the Balancer DAO account to 5k followers by the end of Q2.
  • Aim for 3 submissions per Balancer Bounties

Plan for Q2

The goal is to improve the BalancerDAO brand awareness and our voice in general.

In the next quarter we will focus on:

  • putting more order in everything we do and plan and be more transparent with the ballers and community
  • make new campaigns (maybe on Twitter too),
  • Look at reward based NFTs/POAPs for on chain metrics and social media involvement.
  • Continue Pools of the Week posts, and new pool live.
  • Continue progressing with veBAL campaign with more informative tweets and highlighting projects utilizing.
  • Establish #BALbattles
  • Look at incorporating Youtube video into Notion, Medium articles and other posts where possible.
  • be more active and involved in IRL events (not just sponsoring but also having ballers there)

Community Dev

Budget

There was a budget of $300 per month to pay for a community gitbooks account. This will be extended through Q2 for a total ask of $900 for Q2.

Successes

Learnings

  • Dev time always takes longer than expected
  • Writing good and comprehensive documentation is time-consuming

Q2 KPI(s)

  • Launch info.balancer.fi (analytics) - with support for mainnet, Arbitrum and Polygon
  • Launch balancer.tools v2
  • Write first community developer documentation on our DAO gitbooks
  • Maintain, expand, and support further development of documentation as new technologies are implemented. - Couple these with the marketing subDAO’s focuses
    • Examples: veBAL, boosted pools, managed pools, fuse / turbo etc.

Conclusion

In total, BalancerDAO is requesting:

  • $127,500 in stables and 21,250 BAL for Compensation
  • $44,900 in stables and 65,925 BAL for budgets outside of Compensation
    • 46,425 BAL out of 65,925 BAL is for Grants

There is ~500 BAL remaining from the unspent Q1 budget.

Thus, the following transactions will be initiated from the DAO Multisig if this vote is approved:

  • A transfer of 46,425 BAL to the Grants Multisig at 0xE2c91f3409Ad6d8cE3a2E2eb330790398CB23597
  • A transfer of ($127,500 + $44,900) = $172,400 of bbaUSD to the Ops Multisig at 0x166f54F44F271407f24AA1BE415a730035637325
  • A transfer of (21,250 + 65,925 - 46425 - 500) = 40,250 BAL to the Ops Multisig at 0x166f54F44F271407f24AA1BE415a730035637325
10 Likes

Thank you Solar for your admin work. Really good

6 Likes

It is amazing to see how productive each subDAO is. Very proud to be part of this great group!

7 Likes

It’s great to read the summary of everything that happened in Q1. A few months ago I joined and it is notorious that everything has been improving. Congratulations to the whole team, it’s a pleasure to be here. :rocket:

4 Likes

Excited to keep growing as a DAO in Q2!

4 Likes

Fantastic breakdown. Loving what the dao is doing the more I dig in.

3 Likes