[BIP-568] Fund Balancer Maxis for Q2 2024

PR with Payload

https://github.com/BalancerMaxis/multisig-ops/pull/848

Introduction

The Maxis pave a luminous path towards a radiant future for the Balancer ecosystem

The new year started with much optimism which is reflected in the increased positive momentum in the market. Balancer has pivoted as one of the main liquidity hubs for LRTs and LSTs. The Maxis have played a crucial role in making sure our various partners have a seamless experience while onboarding to Balancer tech.

This positive momentum, however, has also resulted in an immense increase in workload for Maxis, be it on the operational side or partner management. The group performed exceptionally, although we had changes in our team structure with Shakotan leaving and moving on to work for Radiant Capital.

The combination of increased responsibility and workload are key factors for us to focus on automating as many internal and on-chain processes as possible while also making the partner experience as seamless as possible - both for Balancer v2 and v3. We took a lot of learnings from Q1 and want to transition to a more professional Dev- and GovOps organization. We will therefore focus our efforts on 2 key initiatives: automation and stellar partner experience for v2 and v3. To achieve these goals we need a balance of retaining the current talented team and having enough flexibility to attract new talent for our various development tasks.

Additionally, we will undergo some structural modifications to reflect these changes: Danko and the Ballers will transition into the Balancer OpCo (Admin & Ops) for administrative and operations, ecosystem liaison and community mod tasks. This is an ideal opportunity as we further decentralize our SP landscape and strengthen our DAO, while also focusing the teams on what they are good at. Learn more about it on the Foundation’s funding proposal.

We are incredibly excited about the road ahead. Our protocol metrics show amazing performance across the board and we are dedicated to make sure Balancer will continue to be the go-to blue chip AMM in this market cycle!

Initiatives

In Q1, we introduced initiatives which helped us focus our efforts to specific work domains. In general, we had great experience with these work packages but will make sure to not overcommit this quarter with too many tasks, as smooth DAO operations are our highest priority. Therefore, we will focus our energy on 2 initiatives resulting in the highest possible impact for the DAO.

Initiative 1: Transition to a professional DevOps organization with Automation

Co-Leads: Xeonus & Tritium

Team: gosuto, Zekraken, Zen Dragon (and freelancers)

Summary The Balancer Maxis have been maintaining and operating key infrastructure in the DAO. These components include the Fee sweep automation repo, Reward injectors and grant distribution automation. Furthermore, we were assigned the task to maintain and take over the OZ defender infrastructure making sure BAL gets streamed to all Balancer deployments.

We made significant advancements in Q1 but need to further focus on streamlining all these repositories. A main focus will also be set on migrating the infrastructure we took over from BLabs to a new version as the old one will be deprecated June 1st 2024. We therefore have a clear set of objectives to fulfill and also plan to use freelance resources to complete them.

Objectives

1. Fee Sweep Automation:

• Refactor and improve code base incl. integration tests
• Provide transparent and meaningful reports so that all DAO participants (investors and partners alike) can understand the mechanisms behind our core pool framework
• Work together with Mimic or other partners to improve fee sweep performance
• Evaluate and improve voting incentive placements
• Re-evaluate Aura fee recycling

2. vlAURA Voting:

• Provision automatic voting as outlined in BIP-508
• Make the DAO owned vlAURA position easy to maintain (relocks etc).

3. OZ Defender:

• Establish a repository in the Balancer Maxis org
• Implement deployment pipelines with the OZ API for professional CI/CD integration
• Migrate to OZ Defender v2 and set up the enterprise tier subscription plan. The costs will be covered by Balancer OpCo.
• Assess and negotiate the usage of a professional subscription to run our operations
• Implement further monitoring
• If possible, implement gas usage optimizations

4. RewardsInjector v2

• Finalize the new design
• Write integration tests
• Get a smart contract review
• Make new contract ready to be used for Q3 latest

5. Gauges and core pools

• Automatic core pool detection and maintenance
• Automatic gauge removal flagging

Initiative 2: Grow Balancer v2 and Support v3 Design

Lead: MikeB

Team: Maxis

Summary Balancer v3 is in active development and set to go public with developer documentation and other collateral materials in April. Balancer v3 is set to compete with the established developer community of Uni v4. It’s crucial to foster the development of a robust ecosystem based on Balancer v3, ensuring it offers a compelling alternative for developers and projects.

At the same time, we strive to improve the quality of the partner experience for Balancer v2 while also supporting the launch on promising L2 chains with our technical expertise. Balancer v2 will remain a core component of the Balancer ecosystem and we strive to make it as easy to use as possible.

Objectives for v3 design:

• Onboarding of Innovative Teams: Attract and integrate teams that are developing novel automated market makers (AMMs) for Balancer v3.
• Facilitate Hook Development: Bring innovative hooks to market through developer outreach and incentive alignment.
• Market Fit Identification for v3 Products: Assess and establish the market relevance of v3 offerings..
• Serving as a Liaison: Act as the primary point of contact for external teams working on Balancer v3, facilitating seamless communication and collaboration.
• Technical Support Coordination: Collaborate with the integrations and BLabs teams to ensure that building teams receive adequate technical assistance.
• Finalizing v3 Feature Scope: Conclude the initial feature set for Balancer v3, aligning it with market needs and developer capabilities.

Objectives for v2 growth:

• Improve partner experience supporting the marketing team with a consistent partner onboarding pack and process
• Improved partner onboarding experience by streamlining internal processes
• Streamline and simplify gauge on- and offboarding (incl. automatic flagging of deprecated gauges)

Service Provider Name & Overview: Balancer Maxis

Leader(s): Xeonus, joined by the talented Mike B, Zekraken, Zen Dragon, Tritium and Gosuto

Contributors/Freelancers: Hyferion, jalbrekt

Adhere to [BIP-372] and the SP standards: YES

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:

• Governance and Protocol Operations
• Strategy and Business Development
• On-Chain Operations (DevOps)
• Pool Design and Ecosystem Coordination
• Data Analytics and Reporting

Key Objectives per Operational Discipline:

1. Governance and Protocol Operations

• Leading governance procedures, ensuring their execution and integrity.
• Facilitating technical discussions within governance scopes.
• Setting up governance votes and reviewing payloads for DAO transactions.
• Crafting detailed governance proposals and specifications.
• Offering deep technological insights during governance deliberations.
• Assisting in specifications to proposals for proper payload execution
• Infrastructure and tool creation for enhancing governance operations.
• Automating tasks, reducing human dependency in governance functions.
• Creating UI tools that support operational tasks (past examples: pool creation, reward injectors, linear pool deployment [deprecated])

Strategy and Business Development

• Applying profound product and technical knowledge in strategic planning.
• Engaging with new partners and broader Web3 communities.
• Providing technical support and insights for strategic development.
• Assisting in custom pool creations and new chain launches.
• Managing revenue flows and direct incentives with partners.
• Facilitating discussions on financial incentives and revenue optimization.
• Acting as active partner support and assisting new partners navigate the ecosystem

3. On-Chain Operations (DevOps)

• Overseeing DevOps and automating multisig operations.
• Building multisig payloads and conducting multi-person peer-reviews
• Guidance on infrastructure-related aspects.
• Overseeing Stipend Distribution Automation
• Coordinating protocol fee sweep automation
• Core development, aiding in automation and data management.
• Smart contract development(when needed)
• Taking over on chain automation for OZ Defender and migrating to new version of it
• Support in technical best practices.
• Bi-weekly fees processing and reporting
• Grant program management and operations (if applicable)

4. Pool Design and Ecosystem Coordination

• Designing pools for the protocol, aligning with governance specifications.
• Liaising with the ecosystem for synchronized functionality and growth.
• Assistance in pool design and migration to v3
• Token whitelisting and front-end testing.
• Assisting in the technical aspects of pool and gauge creation.
• Testing of v3 front-end infrastructure

5. Data Analytics and Reporting

• Spearheading data analytics, offering valuable insights through reports and dashboards.
• Maintaining high-level expertise in protocol-related data.
• Providing quarterly financial reports
• Assisting in data handling, contributing to informed decision-making.

Length of Engagement & Budget

The biggest adjustment in the Maxis funding proposal is the allocation of $60k USDC for discretionary budget for the entire quarter. Main reasons are the increased demand in resources to conclude tasks as described in the automation initiative like smart contract reviews, resource allocation for the OZ defender integration and stabilization of our platform. We will make sure to use these funds as conservatively as possible and will report on the usage in the monthly reports. Overall, people costs in USDC terms will be at par or below the previous quarters ($117,000 for Q2) as the Maxis will take part of their compensation in locked BAL vesting for 1 year. The fraction of locked BAL for compensation across contributors is 56% on average.

We have furthermore deducted following savings from this quarterly funding proposal:

• 11,880 USDC
• 800 BAL

Length of engagement: 3 months

Budget: 165,120 USDC and 18,625 BAL

ETH Address to Receive Funds: 0x166f54F44F271407f24AA1BE415a730035637325

Impact on the Treasury

The Treasury wallets currently hold ~4.2M BAL. Funding the Balancer Maxis for Q2 2024 would cost around 0.4% of the treasury’s BAL holdings, which annualizes to ~1.74% of the treasury’s BAL. The Treasury wallets currently hold ~5.78M in USDC. Funding the USDC portion would cost around 2.86% of the treasury’s USDC, which annualizes to ~11.43%.

Technical Specification

Shakotan with address 0x8053484489b110181a6dba0b59dda887e433f470 will be offboarded from all relevant multi-sig safes and be replaced by gosuto.eth 0x11761c7b08287d9489CD84C04DF6852F5C07107b (can be verified here). It is therefore proposed to swap Shakotan for gosuto in the Balancer Maxi Signer set. This grants signership to a number of 3/6 multisigs. Safes, signers and permissions can be understood by reviewing this Table in the docs.

The Balancer DAO multisig 0x10A19e7eE7d7F8a52822f6817de8ea18204F2e4f will interact with USDC 0xA0b86991c6218b36c1d19D4a2e9Eb0cE3606eB48 by writing transfer passing the Maxi Safe 0x166f54F44F271407f24AA1BE415a730035637325 as recipient and amount 165120 USDC as 165120000000.

Furthermore the Balancer DAO multisig 0x10A19e7eE7d7F8a52822f6817de8ea18204F2e4f will interact with BAL 0xba100000625a3754423978a60c9317c58a424e3D by writing transfer passing the Maxi Safe 0x166f54F44F271407f24AA1BE415a730035637325 as recipient and amount 18625 as 18625000000000000000000.