[Proposal] Staking of BPT for Economic and Governance Benefits

Governance General Proposal
40

Let me give an update on where things are for this proposal.

First of all I’d like to say that this proposal has been discussed for a long time and is very well written, however it’s not detailed enough (nor do I think it could be) to be used as a technical specification of how everything will be implemented at the smart contract level.

Balancer Labs is extremely busy (with a small team) working on projects that we believe will improve our #1 goal of increasing volume and useful TVL on Balancer protocol. Working from scratch in this project of staking BPT to get veBPT is a major task that would mean delaying other important projects if this is done by Balancer Labs right now.

I have been talking to other projects that were also interested in a similar staking solution. Most of them just used Curve’s contracts, the others like us who want to do small changes are pretty much waiting for another team to implement a version in solidity (Curve’s is in vyper).

I see two practical options for how this proposal could be implemented:

  1. We just use Curve’s smart contracts: Even though Curve is a direct competitor to Balancer I think this is something we should consider given their contracts have been battle tested for a long time and have lots of integrations on top of them (like Convex and other farming protocols). Another advantage would be that if/when a protocol-level fee is activated on Balancer, this system would already be a way to direct these fees (stakers would get them like on Curve). A downside would be to have a mix of vyper and solidity code in our core smart contracts.

  2. We set up a grant/bounty for a third party team to implement this project from scratch. There would be other teams that probably would be interested in contributing, but we should not count on that. In this case we would need to work on a technical specification with clear/exact technical requirements, desired roadmap and how the grant would be disbursed over time.

This vote has been great to show that BAL token holders are massively in favor of this change, however it’s a hard-to-implement one.

Please let me know your thoughts!

5 Likes