Summarizing Batch #1 of Grants from the Balancer Ecosystem Fund
In July 2020, the Balancer community voted to allocate 100K BAL from the Balancer Ecosystem Fund toward our first ever batch of grants. These funds would be carefully given to hand-selected teams and individuals building projects or providing services that are vital to the long-term growth and defensibility of the Balancer protocol.
I’m pleased to announce that we have now almost completely allocated batch #1, with 95,333 BAL committed to grant recipients. Not all of these grants have been completed; if any grant recipients fail to deliver on their agreed-upon results, their grants will not be rewarded and their respective BAL allocations will be automatically made available for the next batch that is approved by the community.
Notice that grants awarded before BAL launched (6/20/20) took into account the seed price of $0.60 per BAL, so there is a considerable variation in the grant amounts. Grants were awarded before the batch approval by the community as Balancer Labs considered other viable options to replace them in case the batch wasn’t approved by the community for whatever reason. Some of the grants were negotiated and agreed upon before any related work was started, and some were awarded in retrospect as recognition of contributors who voluntarily added meaningful value to the Balancer ecosystem and community. We think it would be great to expand the latter format in future batches.
Here’s a categorized list of all grant recipients from batch #1:
Integrators
DEX.AG
Commitment Date: 6/1/20
Grant Amount: 14,667 BAL
Project Status: Complete
Description: DEX.AG is a DEX aggregator. The grant has been awarded for the integration of Balancer as a source of liquidity early on when our protocol had just been launched. This integration has served as a valuable source of trading volume for Balancer.
1inch.exchange
Commitment Date: 6/5/20
Grant Amount: 3,000 BAL
Project Status: Complete
Description: 1inch is a DEX aggregator. The grant has been awarded for integrating Balancer as a source of liquidity for trading on the 1inch platform, as well as allowing 1inch users to add and remove liquidity to Balancer pools directly. This integration has served as a valuable source of trading volume and liquidity for Balancer.
Zapper.fi
Commitment Date: 6/3/20
Grant Amount: 3,000 BAL
Project Status: Complete
Description: Zapper is a beautiful front-end interface that facilitates transactions directly through multiple DeFi protocols. The Zapper team integrated Balancer as back-end infrastructure for their platform, allowing users to make trades and supply or withdraw liquidity on Balancer’s AMM.
Hummingbot
Commitment Date: 8/5/20
Grant Amount: 4,000
Project Status: In Progress
Description: We will award a grant to the Hummingot team for developing open source connectors to enable using Hummingbot as an arbitrage tool for Balancer pools. This will improve the efficiency of our markets, increase trading volume, and thus increase trading fees earned by liquidity providers.
Community Support
rabmarut
Commitment Date: 6/5/20
Grant Amount: 1,000 BAL
Project Status: Complete
Description: We awarded a grant to our community member rabmarut for their great work as a valuable Balancer community representative.
followthechain
Commitment Date: 6/5/20
Grant Amount: 1,000 BAL
Project Status: Complete
Description: We awarded a grant to our community member followthechain for their great work as a valuable Balancer community representative.
CryptoPlaza
Commitment Date: 6/5/20
Grant Amount: 2,000
Project Status: Complete
Description: We awarded a grant to the CryptoPlaza team for their work in organizing the Spanish language Balancer community, making valuable introductions to the Balancer Labs team, creating valuable content/events (see here, here and here) and serving as early liquidity providers on our platform.
Tools
Predictions.exchange
Commitment Date: 6/25/20
Grant Amount: 250 BAL
Project Status: Complete
Description: We awarded a grant to mykha2 for developing a portal providing statistical information on Balancer pools, which helped users better understand the performance of their investments and to evaluate investment opportunities on Balancer. The project has been shut down, but saw significant usage while it was being maintained.
Pools.vision
Commitment Date: 7/26/20
Grant Amount: 1,500 BAL
Project Status: Complete
Description: We awarded a grant to solarcurve for building pools.vision, which provides an interface with detailed analytics on Balancer pools to help users better understand the performance of their investments and to evaluate investment opportunities.
Community Dashboard
Commitment Date: 8/20/20
Grant Amount: 666 BAL
Project Status: In Progress
Description: We will award a grant to Nick Tong of the Balancer community for delivering a dashboard of key performance metrics of the Balancer protocol. The initial proposal for this project started with a focus on marketing and growth, however the scope evolved to focus on delivering a community dashboard and was subsequently approved.
Builders on Balancer
Aave
Commitment Date: 6/18/20
Grant Amount: 25,000 BAL
Project Status: In Progress
Description: We will award a grant to the Aave team for their integration of Balancer protocol at the heart of their new tokenomics, within the SM (Safety Module), which allows stakers to stake BPTs of a big 80/20 AAVE/ETH showcasing Joel Monegro’s idea of proof of liquidity. This pool is expected to contain $100M or more.
Aave
Commitment Date: 6/18/20
Grant Amount: 25,000 BAL
Project Status: In Progress
Description: We will also award a grant to the Aave team for their integration of various BPTs (Balancer Pool Tokens) as well as $BAL as money markets.
UMA
Commitment Date: 6/25/20
Grant Amount: 1,000 BAL
Project Status: Complete
Description: We awarded a grant to the UMA team for providing $4M in liquidity via the UMA/ETH pool on Balancer as well as for the joint research done around perpetual synthetic smart pools which will hopefully soon be implemented.
PieDAO
Commitment Date: 7/28/20
Grant Amount: 5,000
Project Status: Complete
Description: We awarded a grant to the PieDAO team for spearheading the first ever smart pools in the Balancer ecosystem. Their work has served to create public awareness of Balancer smart pools and to pave the way for developers to better understand use cases, as well as bringing indirect value to our ecosystem via time and resources they spent on audits and development.
Perpetual Protocol
Commitment Date: 9/25/20
Grant Amount: 2,000 BAL
Project Status: Complete
Description: We awarded a grant to the Perpetual Protocol team for pioneering the first ever Liquidity Bootstrapping Pool (LBP) on Balancer, with the launch of the PERP token. This has helped spread awareness of LBPs as a better alternative to other IDOs and has led to multiple teams working on their own implementations.
Element Finance
Commitment Date: 9/28/20
Grant Amount: 6,250 BAL
Project Status: In Progress
Description: We will award a grant to the Element Finance team for using Balancer to develop stable, liquid smart pools, holding yield and interest bearing assets or strategies, providing a market for future yield and liquidity across positions.