[BIP-18] Fund the Balancer Maxis for Q3

Service Provider Name & Overview

The Balancer Maxis are a passionate group of Balancer community contributors. A center of excellence that keeps the Balancer ecosystem operating at a first class level. As the protocol grows, this team's responsibilities will likely grow with it. We have picked up maintenance tasks from other organizations in the Balancer ecosystem as it continues to decentralize and would expect this to continue (see examples below).

Leader(s)

Solarcurve - joined by Zekraken, Mike B, Xeonus, Zen Dragon, and Danko8383.

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

Multisig Management

• Linear (boosted) pool settings
• Swap fee and amplification adjustments
• Adding newly approved gauges to veBAL
• Adding new reward tokens to gauges
• Withdrawing and distributing protocol fees
• Verifying and queuing all transactions before execution by the DAO Multisig

Expertise: Besides setting swap fees, this group has done all these tasks from day 1. Soon after we took control of swap fees from our friends at Gauntlet, the protocol broke the previous record of 24h fees earned. We believe our track record justifies our continued management of these multisigs until such time as governance approves another SP to take them over.

Governance

• We serve on the Governance Council and ensure continuity of Balancer’s Governance Process
• Active participants in discord and the forum on governance topics
• Several of us are delegates
• Advise projects on Balancer’s governance process
• Manage admin of the Governance forum
• We will pursue various strategic initiatives, either individually or as a group, at our discretion such as deploying to Optimism or the new Operating Framework
• In the cases that voting power in other protocols from tokens held in Balancer’s Treasury has been delegated to us, we will represent Balancer’s interest in these votes.

Expertise: We helped to design Balancer’s governance system and are very active users of it. It is safe to say our group has the strongest working knowledge of Balancer’s governance system outside of Balancer Labs. For now it does require active management to ensure votes are carried out in an orderly fashion then properly executed. We believe our track record here again speaks for itself and we will continue to operate in the same fashion we have been until governance approves a new governance framework or approves another SP to take these tasks over.

User/project support

• We manage Balancer’s discord and ensure questions or concerns are addressed
• Help projects use Balancer by offering advice or answering questions
• We often deploy new pools for other projects
• Whitelisting and maintaining token lists
• We help with UI testing for Balancer

Expertise: If you come to discord we’ll likely be the ones helping you out. We are also spread out in many chats with projects offering advice and performing routine necessary tasks as described above. It is safe to say almost all projects that have used Balancer over the last year have spoken to one of us at some point. We will continue to operate in this support capacity and offer any assistance we can to the community and the efforts of other SP’s.

Community

• We manage a Coordinape circle open to all DAO contributors
• Onboarding framework for new contributors
• Offboarding for contributors transitioning from the DAO, or between SPs
• Regular health-check on SP and community contributors with recurrent feedback

Expertise: These initiatives were pioneered by some of our members over the last six months. We will continue iterating and exploring these both with our in house knowledge but also in collaboration with the broader community.

Record Keeping

• We will maintain a notion page detailing the activity of each of our controlled multisigs. Included will be documentation on how to use the powers of the multisig so a future SP can easily take it over in case we are off boarded.
• Maintaining, updating, and improving official Balancer documentation as a bridge between the greater community and core development team.

Key Objectives & Success Metrics

Multisig Management

• Transactions are vetted for accuracy and executed in a timely manner
• Public discord channels are used for swap fee discussion so the community can provide input and feedback.

Governance

• Balancer’s Governance system continues to operate in a fair and transparent manner.
• We will continue being very active participants and leaders

User/project support

• Discord/telegram chat questions will be answered in a timely manner

Community

• Coordinape will pay out promptly each month
• We will act as a touch point for any interested contributors to Balancer DAO

Global

• We commit to undertake all activities in public where reasonable. We aim to responsibly grow the Balancer Maxis and this can only be done when the community is able to interact and engage with us. There must be more opportunities for this in the future.
• We will continue to facilitate the weekly Treasury meeting (Tuesday 11am EST in discord) open to the public. This is a good opportunity for anyone in the community to talk to us about the Treasury or any other relevant topic.
• We will facilitate a monthly community call where all SP’s are welcome to join for their monthly updates. This eases the burden on the community to attend many calls. Again, optional participation by other SP’s.

Length of Engagement & Budget:

3 months.

Budget of 6,875 BAL per month for salaries (1,250 per person, Danko at 625) which will be max locked in veBAL by contributors. Additional monthly allocations of 100 BAL for gas costs and 4,000 BAL for Coordinape.

Total for 3 month engagement: 32,925 BAL

Impact on the Treasury: The Treasury currently holds ~4M BAL. Funding the Balancer Maxis would cost less than 1% of the treasury’s BAL holdings.

ETH Address to Receive Funds: 0x166f54F44F271407f24AA1BE415a730035637325

Link to SLA (if going through the Foundation): N/A

As a final note, if this proposal passes Zen Dragon will be replacing mkflow on the Governance Council as he voluntarily steps away and into other roles in the ecosystem. We thank him for his service. The members of the council will now be Solarcurve, Mike B, Zekraken, Xeonus, and Zen Dragon.