This comment isn’t directed at the Symmetric team, but rather to the DAO/community that votes on Friendly Fork proposals. It is not intended in any way meant to accuse anyone of ill-intent, but is instead a proposition to the community not to blindly approve a fork without solid, trustless verification.
There is undoubtedly a huge amount of work that goes into getting a Friendly Fork off the ground from market/chain identification, to finding a team, to getting all of the many, many the parts together. I do not want to belittle the work on the BalancerDAO side and the forking team side. What I do want to say though is that it’s a massive reputation risk on Balancer to approve any FF that comes along. Especially when teams are anonymous/pseudonymous/etc, there is an even greater risk that something bad could happen.
I would therefore like to propose that having deployed, verifiably identical bytecode of the core contracts is an absolute precondition to a FF even being considered. I have high hopes for the Hexagon project, for example, but have a really bad taste in my mouth that that vote went through so easily and there are no contracts anywhere to be found.