[BIP-191] Funding Proposal for Messari Reporting 2023

Service Provider Name & Overview: Messari

Leader(s): Jack Purdy, John_TV_Locke, Traver Normandi

Pledge to abide by the DAO’s Code of Conduct (or link to your own): Yes

Pledge to abide by the Accountability Guidelines: Yes

Domains of Operation: Research, Reporting, Data Analytics, Growth

Overview:

We are proposing Messari becomes a core Service Provider focused on research and reporting for the DAO, renewing the previous contract for 25% less while expanding it to include more advanced data tooling and governance reporting. This is done through Messari’s Protocol Services, which is separate from Messari Enterprise, the entirety of our work is funded through project grants enabling us to make it all publicly available.

Messari Protocol Services believes in the power and importance of transparency and education in DeFi. Protocols enable permissionless networks, and DAOs manage the parameters and designs of the protocol and related token. Both users and members of the DAO benefit from deep data research and communication. Messari PS hires and trains analysts to become a productive member of DAO communities and experts in the protocols they cover, enabling them to help surface key data and events to the largest distribution of crypto users, investors, and builders available. DeFi, and crypto in general, requires unbiased third parties to work with communities to surface transparent, detailed, and digestible information about the protocol and DAO. Messari PS is the leading provider for that solution.

For an update from our prior proposal, as a company Messari has 3x our headcount with a team of over 150 after raising a Series B led by Brevan Howard Digital. We’ve used that to significantly scale our research, data science, and engineering resources to build out our quarterly reporting and research capabilities. This has enabled us to bring all of our research in-house so we can have dedicated sector-specific analysts assigned to each protocol to cover them each quarter and continue to build up expertise.

We have become core subgraph developers for The Graph and are building out open-source data infrastructure that feeds into our quarterly reports and live data dashboards.

Lastly, we have been working extensively on growing our distribution and have signed deals to redistribute quarterly reports with Bloomberg, S&P Global, and Refinitiv three of the largest tradfi research platforms in the world.

Existing Work:

Quarterly reports

• State of Balancer Q1
• State of Balancer Q2
• State of Balancer Q3
• State of Balancer Q4

Data Analytics and Infrastructure

• Subgraphs (Ethereum, Arbitrum, Polygon)
• Protocol Metrics dashboard
• Balancer Dune Dashboard

Governance

• Messari Governor coverage tracking, summarizing, categorizing over 300 proposals
• Two long-form proposal summaries related to Balancer DAO and its products:
  • Governor Note: The veBAL Wars.
  • Governor Note: Introducing Staked aTokens.

Other Contributions:

• First veBAL value statement
• veBAL unlock schedule
• Featured pool analyses
• 3rd party qualitative analysis on major DAO debates and decisions and protocol changes
• Multiple engagements in the forum
• Participating in monthly SP calls
• Participating in Governance Twitter spaces

Note: Everything listed above is freely accessible

Proposal Breakdown:

Quarterly Reporting

We will produce 4 quarterly reports following the same cadence released shortly after the end of the fiscal quarter. These will break down major KPIs and fundamental metrics such as:

• Aggregate stats - protocol revenue, veBAL distribution, BL incentives, operating margins
• Dex metrics - trading volume, liquidity, new pools
• LP metrics - LP fees, annualized yield

We will look at these from both the macro level and on a more granular level from individual pool level data and network deployments. The data will come from the publicly available subgraphs and Dune dashboards we’ve built.

Data Analytics

We’ve already released freely available data dashboards showing many of the metrics included in the quarterly reports. We plan to extend this by building an advanced LP analytics page showing:

• Pool rankings based on
  • Liquidity, trading volume, revenue, capital efficiency, revenue/$ of TVL
• Profitability calculator
  • Pool returns split out by swap fees and reward emissions
• Backtesting of different LP positions
• Simulating future returns
• Help user in finding best pools based on their LP profile
  • Shortlist pools to LP on based on LP profile and preferences
  • Track performance of LP positions over time
  • Compare across different deployments and different pools

Governance Analysis

• A Bi-Annual Governance Report
  • Messari will create bi-annual reports to analyze key governance KPIs and metrics and a detailed look into governance structure, process, dynamics, and analysis. (ex: Optimism)
  • Details include:
    • Introduction
      • Balancer Structure and Process Updates.
    • Quantitative Analysis
      • veBAL Distribution.
      • Power Dynamics (Voter blocs, whales, voter history, etc.)
      • Proposal Analysis (Proposal history, success rate, participation metrics, categorization, etc.).
    • Qualitative Analysis
      • Governance Design
        • Structure/Process Analysis.
        • Quorum Analysis.
        • Exploration of governance opportunities.
      • Proposal Analysis
        • Highlight of contentious proposals or noteworthy governance events.
    • Conclusion
• Retainer for a Balancer Governor Note
  • A 1500-3000 word proposal-specific analysis designed to educate stakeholders on the impacts of important DAO proposals.

Key Objectives & Success Metrics:

1. Surfacing on-chain metrics and protocol developments

Crypto has a glaring lack of sufficient long-form research and analytics. While there are various analytics dashboards, blog posts, and messaging channels to distill information, it is still cumbersome to have a strong understanding of the on-chain activity and important protocol-level developments. This creates a high barrier to making informed decisions as a stakeholder, leading to a misallocation of resources, both time and money, since there are investors, developers, and users that are not acting with the full breadth of knowledge at their disposal.

These services will inform various stakeholders through recurring, data-driven research from trusted, independent analysts. The actionable insights generated from these reports will better educate these stakeholders on the economic, financial, and social health of Balancer.

2. Growth

Not only are we creating these reports but we’re ensuring they get sent out to a wide audience that can consume them. This is done through Messari’s channels of 300,000 crypto-natives, which reach most of the active builders and investors in the industry as well as through our distribution through some of the largest traditional research platforms in the world:

Bloomberg Terminal: 325,000 users

S&P Global Capital IQ: 12,000 enterprises

Refinitiv (formerly Thomson Reuters): 40,000 enterprises and 400,000 users

This goes a long way to further professionalize Balancer to the vast majority of major funds, banks, financial service companies, and large corporations in the world that will better grasp the magnitude of economic activity generated by the protocol. There are trillions of dollars in AUM represented by these platforms so even a small percentage of users consuming this information and acting on it can drive meaningful activity to the protocol.

*A note on success metrics. Given the nature of this proposal, it can be difficult to directly attribute benefits. For example, you can have institutional players consuming reports on Bloomberg and using that as a key part of their diligence to allocate capital however its not possible to say $x of liquidity or investment came in as a result of Messari Research. While we know this is happening anecdotally we can’t tangibly measure it.

Length of Engagement & Budget:

edit: We propose the base quarterlies option for the current cycle:

$80k total a. 4 Quarterly reports b. at least one tweet on each quarterly report c. AMA with the DAO on SP calls about quarterly take-aways and inspo for new analysis

Payment can be made in stablecoins or BAL based on market price at time of payment (in which case there will be a 5% premium to account for additional costs of accepting native tokens)

In both cases the funds will go towards:

• Research - Our analysts spend several weeks each report along with an extensive internal editing and review process by the broader team.
• Data Science and Engineering - Each report will have its own dedicated data science and engineering resources tasked with providing all the relevant raw data.
• Distribution - We have several members of the team working on distribution for these reports across all of Messari’s channels along with the third-party partners.

ETH Address to Receive Funds: messari.eth