[BIP-711] Expand Hidden Hand Refund Flexibility

Background:

Per BIP-19 Hidden Hand has been providing Balancer DAO an incentives recycling discount of 3%. Hidden Hand’s typical fee placed on voting incentives is 4%, however as Balancer’s core pool incentive structure enshrined Hidden Hand to a degree, their team agreed to returning 3% to the liquidity mining multisig 0xc38c5f97B34E175FFd35407fc91a937300E33860. Over time, since these incentives would have technically gone to veBAL holders, the Maxis have been re-injecting the 3% discount as vote incentives for the bootstrapping of liquidity pools when necessary. While not since inception, the Maxis have been tracking the inflow and outflow of these funds from Hidden Hand in this repository.

Summary:

The intention of this proposal is to give permission to the Balancer Maxis to have increased flexibility using the Hidden Hand rebate it receives to benefit the DAO in a plethora of ways. This would include using the tokens received for veBAL incentives, vlAura incentives, direct incentives, and potentially acquiring BAL in the case the DAO ever chooses to build any sort of token position in the governance ecosystem. The primary intention is to place varying voting incentives and direct emissions to be clear; increasing our flexibility in partner onboarding processes.

Motivation:

Due to the complexity of the veBAL gauge system, as partners are on-boarded into the Balancer ecosystem, 1-3 weeks can go by before a new gauge receives any type of incentives depending on the voting epoch and the network they are deployed on. To decrease the lead time for pools to get from initial bootstrapping to self-sustaining growth the proposed incentives flexibility will have a positive impact. Partners can receive direct incentives sooner than delayed voting incentives. This will not decrease voting incentives in any way, but only bridge the gap between when they are initially placed and when they arrive for LPs to receive.

No technical specification is required. Simply a change of processes will be considered and reflected in the rebate handling repository linked above.