Great points everyone!
I agree with @tongnk and would simplify things by sticking to a fixed amount of BAL.
Also agree with @DavisRamsey that these are all super successful projects (we are talking about wallets like Argent, aggregators like 1inch/Paraswap/Matcha). We should probably do our homework and go after the ones we believe are a must have for Balancer. I think there are 6-10 of them but that could be a longer debate.
My suggestion would be, why don’t we increase the amount so that it’s substantial even for these teams, and that has the nice effect of making them staked in Balancer so that they will always have a tendency of considering us a special partner if future integration work is required for some reason (Balancer will keep shipping and innovating faster and faster). I would propose 10k BAL for each of them, but instead of a 2 years vest with a 1 year cliff (which would mean 5k liquid overnight a year from now), I would do a vesting that only starts in 1 year and ends in 2 years (so they have 5k liquid in 1.5 years).
This new vesting schedule would ensure there is less of a risk of dumping as the BAL will be made liquid continuously. But really, the expectation IMO we should convey to these partners is that we would like them to hold long term and ideally let their communities vote on what to do with these BAL when they become liquid (as opposed to a centralized decision). For all integrators that don’t have a DAO (did not launch a token yet) the expectation is that once this happens the BAL is transferred from the company to the DAO.
We still have over 4.75M BAL in the ecosystem fund as of now, I think spending 60-100k of that with alignment of incentives across the most crucial partners for Balancer is a no-brainer. We need these partners to get more volume, which will make us more relevant and intensify the network effects that IMO will make Balancer extremely successful (see my vision for Balancer).
In terms of process, to simplify maybe we could discuss who these partners are and make a list, then vote specifically to approve the grant for this list. This way we would not take away bandwidth or BAL from the grants committee which has been doing an amazing job at hashing out grants and giving them away. Maybe we would need a group of people to clarify what are the requirements/expectations for each of the partners to receive the grant (it will be different from case to case). That could be a temporary “Integrations committee” or something like that composed of a few technical members that know Balancer well.
Thoughts?