Introduction
For those who don’t know, the Ballers are a group of long term community contributors to Balancer Protocol. This proposal will feature messages from the Ballers about their activities to give the community some context around analyzing the value of this proposal. Under the current framework the Baller program is being funded in three month increments. Our current round of funding is set to expire November 1st, 2021. Over the last few months, the program has grown significantly in member count and scope. Commensurate with this growth is an increase in the funding cost. Currently the Ballers operate with no hierarchy - it is up to each Baller to determine their level of “Ballery” (full or half or none) and their level of engagement.
I have taken the role of distributing the Ballery so I check in with each Baller every month to see what they’re up to and if they have any feedback/concerns. We’ve also adopted bi-weekly Baller Round Table meetings to better coordinate amongst ourselves. I asked each Baller to write up a bit about what they’ve been doing recently so the community has some context to frame the discussion around this proposal - note this was up to each Baller to determine if they wanted to write anything or not.
You can see the list of currently active Ballers here. This is updated to be reflective of the next three months.
Notable changes compared to the previous three months: Tongnk is going from half Ballery to none as he’s primarily focused on grants where he’s directly compensated. Andrea, Mike B, and Xeonus are moving from half to full as the scale of their contributions have increased.
Baller Active Roles & Contributions
Solarcurve (full): As mentioned above, I handle most administrative duties like Ballery distribution, setting/running meetings, etc. I’ve established community initiatives like POAP’s and project AMA’s which have helped boost discord engagement. I also run the two monthly community events with Balancer Labs. I’m quite active on the governance forum - I’ve authored several successful proposals over the last three months and commented on almost every one I didn’t author. I interface with Balancer Labs to keep them apprised of community events and coordinate the flow of information between them and the Ballers as best I can. I’m part of the Grants DAO which I enjoy because I get to work directly with projects building new things on top of Balancer. Finally, I continue to write the weekly Balancer Report which is now entering its eleventh month.
Zekraken (half): Hi All, I joined the Ballers towards the very end of August and it has been great getting involved in the community. I have outlined a few things I have been working on since then.
- Worked with the Devs to standardized testing scripts for each release
- Currently working on automating these testing scripts
- This project is live on Kovan and I am targeting to launch on Polygon next
- Assisting the LM committee by adding quantitative measures to the weekly decision making process
- Maintaining bug fix resource board in partnership with the Devs,the Ballers, and the community as a whole in order to prioritize most important bug fixes and create a backlog of enhancements
- I’m always on the lookout for newer projects that could eventually utilize the Balancer platform, harvesting these types of relationships is the area newest to me, but hopefully a space where I can garner results in the coming months.
Bakamoto (full): Head of LM committee: overall responsibility for ensuring that liquidity mining rewards are decided upon each week, a snapshot vote is run & and updates are pushed to the github repo on time each week.
Within that role I:
- Work with the committee on ideas to improve liquidity mining & incorporate the committee’s suggestions
- Develop governance proposals to improve liquidity mining management & communicate the committee’s ideas to wider governance
- Meet as needed with Balancer Labs biz dev/growth to align liquidity mining with balancer partnerships
- Take part in partnership meetings with other protocols
- Work with other protocols to establish dual incentive programs which are beneficial for all parties
- Align with Balancer Labs integrations to ensure dual incentive rewards can be claimed as expected
- Work with Mike B to ensure we have pools deployed on time each week
- Serve as primary point of contact for liquidity mining related issues
More adhoc stuff: help out with support on Discord, occasionally work on other non-LM governance proposals, provide feedback from community to Balancer Labs as appropriate, general interest in building Balancer partnerships & regular presence at community events.
Reptile Presidente (half): My contribution has expanded from memes initially into growing the Balancer Intern account which started with solarcurve’s suggestion.
My goal is to grow the account into thousands of followers (and then 10s of thousands) and be able to bring more attention to Balancer and the projects building on top of it. There isn’t any guidelines set on how to run the account which is great because it can be more authentic and more CT like. The plan is to continue posting memes and threads about Balancer. Moving forward, I’d also like to expand into making more memes about the projects building on top of Balancer and doing threads about them (e.g. I have a thread about copper planned soon). The more interactions with those projects, the more followers we can hopefully gain. I also think it’d be good for me to team up with someone more technical, maybe Mike B, and translate some complex/technical concepts of Balancer into more digestible content on Twitter.
Once the account is big enough, we’ll have a real asset as ballers to bring focus to the ecosystem. I would definitely like to continue contributing, it’s fun and I’m a believer of the protocol.
Here’s an overview of the stats for September:
Andrea (full): Hello everyone! I started as a Baller a few months back and my main task has always been taking care of customer support via the Intercom channel you find on the main UI. This position is shared with Mike and we cover almost the full 24 hours.
Over time I participated in other initiatives and at the moment I am currently reorganising the Balancer documentation.
As the Baller Community is very fluid, I often find myself involved in other tasks. During this month I travelled to Madrid to a conference specifically organised around Balancer. The event led to some potential partnerships that I’m following closely to see where they lead. Those partnerships include Universities and Investment funds willing to tip their toes on the DeFi ecosystem and, more specifically, Balancer.
If I had to answer a question of what is exactly my role within the Baller Group, I would probably struggle a bit. For this reason, my next project is to study and learn from other Protocols and figure out how our Balancer DAO could function and what self organisation would look like. Balancer intends to move towards decentralisation, how we are going to achieve that, it’s up to us.
Additionally, my focus will be towards the hispanic/portuguese and Italian communities. Most docs on the “help center” have been translated for those communities so they can feel more welcome. There are some barriers of entry for those not fluent in English and my intention is to help them out as much as possible.
Once the Balancer Documentation is complete (hopefully soon), I will also start the full translation to Spanish.
I am also a firm believer of the Balancer Protocol. I love the product but most of all, I enjoy being around so many smart individuals (my Baller friends).
Luuk (half): Hi all - I’m Luuk, a half-time Baller and full-time DAOist. I’ve been supporting Balancer as a Baller and Grants Committee member for about 5 months now. I try to leverage my network and strategic skills as much as possible.
Currently I’m supporting a total of 6 grants and am involved in a couple of workstream/partnerships between Balancer and other projects such as dHedge & Powerpool. I’m also actively moving on potential new opportunities - such as a big financial service provider we’re in early discussion with to start working on a ETF trading product on Balancer.
Jnapier (half):
Hello, I’ve been trying to give support on discord, and now reddit. I’m a member of the LM committee.
Xeonus (full): My contributions as a Baller consist of implementing tools documentation and guidance to the community so that they can use the Balancer protocol to its fullest potential.
I have been involved and contributed in following areas
Development / coding decentralized infrastructure:
- In the last couple of months I have been working on deploying and maintaining https://balancer.tools .
- In the upcoming months I am working on expanding its functionality such as more in-depth analytics for the incentivized pools and building core functionality for a calculator mode to better estimate rewards.
- Additionally, I am working on setting up a more powerful impermanent loss calculator together with community members. In doing so, I will coach and supervise contributors and integrate any useful implementation into balancer.tools.
- I have also established a bug reporting system together with the Ballers and BLabs to improve the identification and quick resolution of front-end bugs.
- I also work on side-projects like a Discord Captcha-Invite Bot integrated into a dedicated site to decrease the amount of spam the server is experiencing.
Documentation:
- In terms of documentation, I have been involved in updating the liquidity mining docs, FAQ pages and writing guides specifically for Polygon LM when it first launched.
- I am also maintaining and expanding those docs on a regular basis.
- In the future I will contribute on writing documentation on how to use BAL on third-party platforms like mai.finance and others
Community moderation:
- I have established a moderator role at the r/balancerprotocol sub-reddit where I curate content and help users with questions as well as providing updates from other resources.
LM:
- Furthermore, I am actively supporting the LM committee and members on Discord in answering questions around LM, rewards and distribution mechanics.
Mike B (full): My contribution as a Baller consists of:
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Deploying liquidity pools
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Handling live support (w/ Andrea)
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Helping projects distribute dual liquidity mining incentives
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Reporting bugs that make it into production as a result of handling live support requests
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Help out running the discord AMA’s
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Constantly strategizing to improve the liquidity mining program
I try to help out wherever I can to make sure that our collective goals are realized.
Eugin (half): My contribution as a baller consist of:
- Connecting the team/balancer with interested projects that want to deploy on LBP or Bal dex.
- Giving market colour from a VC perspective
- Evaluating the liquidity mining program to see if it’s reasonable.
- Reporting bugs and user test different deployments and suggest improvements
Joey (half): As an active user on Twitter and admin/active member of some Chinese crypto Facebook page/groups (5000+ member group with admin rights, active member in 300K+ member groups), my main job is spreading Balancer’s brand and news to both English and Chinese speakers. Since I have written about DeFi since 2018, I see this is my daily job. Here’s a doc with most of my posts links:
To conclude, during this period, I :
- had an interview with multifarm to talk about yield farming and promote Balancer
- translated some docs (user guide) to Chinese
- translated video subtitles
- started some educational posts like Balancer 101
- help maintain Discord Chinese channel and WeChat group(285), Facebook groups and answer user enquiries.
- regularly translated weekly reports by solarcurve and monthly reports by Balancer Grants
- non regularly translated some Balancer articles and announcements
- started a Chinese Community Medium account at the beginning of October as more Chinese users use VPN to get news. 5 articles, average views is 100 as of now.
- assisted organising 2 AMA for Chinese community, the latest one with 300+ views
- helped spreading our job openings thru our friend Darren Lau in his channel
- helped to communicate with/do initial approach with potential partners
- promoted our grants program and helped projects to apply
- help building a Discord FAQ bot
We(I and Maria) are planning to do an AMA in Chinese community as a role of Baller, in the coming months. As from time to time, I got some interview invitations. I will continue to promote Balancer and help the growth of the community, especially Asian community. I will also keep seeking partnership opportunities with other projects. Learned a lot from Blabs giga brains and other ballers, I’m still exploring my potential and keep contributing what I can do. It’s my pleasure to work with such smart people. Special thanks to Fernando giving me this chance to join the Balancer family and solarcurve’s help in this journey.
Mkflow (half): Hi Balancer participants,
I joined as a Baller mid September. Since then I have created videos which display the typical user-flow and the required interactions with the front-end application. I have also contributed in the forum with the goal of clarifying posts to keep misunderstandings low. Regular day-to-day activities include: Discord assistance, feedback on application testing and Baller
During Q4 I will focus on the following tasks:
- Get one video of Vault interaction released
- Visualizing the balancer ecosystem and how different “working groups” interface with each other. I think this is crucial for all people looking to understand more about the Balancer DAO
Cryptocomical (half): Hello, I recently joined as a baller, I have been contributing by making poaps for the last couple of months to help encourage participation in events. I have also redesigned the logo to represent Balancer DAO and banner/icon for discord. Moving forward I will be more active in other areas including being involved in the Poapathon, creating advertising for tweets and providing graphics for gitbook. I can also provide any other media requirements moving forward to strengthen the Balancer brand and to generate interest and engagement. I am also flexible in terms of getting involved and helping out in any other aspects I can contribute to.
Conclusion & Specification
With a proposed roster of thirteen active Ballers (five full, eight half) at the current rate of 500 BAL per month for full and 250 BAL per month for half with 60% fully unlocked after two years (1 year cliff, 1 year linear vesting) and 40% liquid immediately, the total cost of funding for the next three months is as follows.
1,800 BAL per month in liquid payments * 3 = 5,400 BAL
2,700 BAL per month in vested payments * 3 = 8,100 BAL
In addition, I request 300 BAL as a spending fund to reward notable community contributions and fund any small projects the Ballers might need funding for.
Total: 13,800 BAL
If approved, the ecosystem fund will distribute this amount to a wallet I control. The Ballers desire to re-use existing vesting contracts, so the vested amounts for each Baller would be fully released in October 2023. I will work with Mike McDonald to make a contract for any Baller who does not have an existing vesting contract with a fully vested date that matches the existing ones.
- Proceed with funding
- Do not proceed at this time
0 voters
