[Proposal] Partnership Mining

Partnership Mining - proposal draft by @immutbl, @tongnk, and Oaksprout.

We present this draft for community feedback.

OVERVIEW

Partnership Mining is a community initiative designed to increase the flow of impactful integrations and collaborations that grow TVL, trading volume, swap fees, and public awareness of the Balancer protocol and its surrounding ecosystem.

This is achieved by incentivizing a decentralized network of crypto community participants, “partnership miners” who collectively have deep insights into a wide breadth of crypto protocols, to identify partnership opportunities, make proposals, and connect directly with partner teams to propose and execute value-adding integrations.

This initiative will be managed by the Balancer Ecosystem Team - a combination of Ballers and Balancer Labs team members. Partnership miners may request assistance from the team when there is an apparent opportunity and help is needed.

Partnership miners who suggest unique proposals that are successfully executed receive a distribution of BAL commensurate to the level of impact of the partnership, measured as 5% of trading fees generated by the resulting project.

Accepted proposals will initially be handled as grants, fulfilled by the Balancer Ecosystem Fund (Batch #2). If needed, we will subsequently make a community proposal for dedicated funding from the Balancer treasury.

SCOPE

Proposals will be evaluated by the Balancer Ecosystem Team and accepted based on their subjective discretion, in consideration of the following criteria:

  • The project proposes to build software that sits on top of, or integrates with, the Balancer protocol
  • The partnership opportunity entails a clear plan with the potential to increase Balancer trading volume and/or total liquidity
  • The project is deemed legitimate and not scammy or suspicious, based on the evaluating team’s best judgment
  • The project is fully open-source
  • The project has not already been in contact with the Balancer Ecosystem Team regarding the same kind of partnership that is being proposed
  • The partner project has agreed to the proposal or has explicitly expressed interest

PROGRAM STRUCTURE

This structure treats Partnership Mining as a trial. As such, we have optimized for the program to be simple to set up, adjust and wind-down if need be. Consider it an MVP.

  1. External teams propose Partnership Projects to the Ecosystem Team.
  2. The Ecosystem Team evaluates proposals.
  3. Successful proposals are added to a public list to avoid duplicate proposals.

Proposals can include a request for an implementation grant up to $5k in BAL. During this program trial, capital-light proposals will be favored over proposals requesting more funds.

Calculating Rewards

Once the project has been live for 6 months, the partnership miner(s) receive 5% of all trading fees since launch. This 5% is paid out in BAL and capped at $20k USD equivalent.

Example 1: a project generates $100k in fees in its first 6 months after launch. They receive $5k in BAL reward payout.

Example 2: a project generates $1m in fees in its first 6 months after launch. Even though 5% of $1m is $50k, the project receives the capped amount of $20K in BAL reward payout.

Proposals must estimate a launch date. If that expires before launch, the Ecosystem Team reserves the right to void fee rewards.

The Ecosystem Team will keep a keen eye out for foul-play and attempts at gaming the rewards. If foul-play is suspected, the team reserves the right to withhold a portion or entirety of the rewards.

Measuring Success

The overall objective of the program is to increase fee-generating activity through partnerships and integrations. If the program is generating more than 1% of the protocol’s entire revenue 12 months after the 3 month trial period ends, it can be deemed worthy of extension.

Extension

What could be done to scale up the program?
Here are just a few ideas to boost the participation and efficacy of the program. In all likelihood, as the program is run we will collect and sort feedback to improve the program.

  • Increase how long fee rewards are earned for
  • Increase the initial reward amount
  • Introduce higher reward tiers for teams that vest their rewards in BAL
  • Increase competitiveness for partnership teams by introducing reward multipliers based on performance
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