[BIP-514] Fund Balancer Maxis Q1-2024

PR with Payload

https://github.com/BalancerMaxis/multisig-ops/pull/697

Introduction

Maxis queue up to embark on the v3 journey

The Balancer Maxis are thrilled to announce our pivotal role in the upcoming development of Balancer v3. Recognized as key contributors and the vital link between partners and the protocol, our dedication to the DAO is unwavering. As we embark on another quarter, our commitment is not just to continue, but to evolve – to redefine our engagement and amplify our positive impact on the DAO in 2024.

The third quarter marked a significant transition for the Maxis. Following the departure of our strategic visionary, Solarcurve, we embraced change and innovation. Tritium rose to the occasion, leading critical initiatives like the core pool incentive automation, as well as securing and executing on the Arbitrum STIP, demonstrating our adaptability and resilience.

Our evolution goes beyond roles and responsibilities. The Maxis are transforming from a collective of passionate enthusiasts to a team of full-time, professional experts. The new full-time addition consists of @Xeonus who will spearhead our strategic direction.

Our mindful approach to funding allocation ensures an efficient use of resources – balancing USDC and BAL demands with maximum effectiveness. Our focus is not just on growth but on impact and transparency.

In 2024 we want to make the most impact by driving forward exciting initiatives while providing excellent mission-critical services to the DAO. We have identified four main (non-v3 dependent) initiatives to channel our efforts, while continuing to provide the core services that have been the backbone of the DAO for over two years.

Initiatives

Beyond regular operations, the Maxi’s are focused on trying to create successful narratives in the Balancer ecosystem through various focused initiatives. In 2024, we strive to focus on a few of them, ensure that our focus areas have a clear leader/champion and some defined goals and that time and resources are available to focus on these topics. The impact of those topics is directly related to the achieved objectives.

Initiative 1: Growth beyond Mainnet

Lead: Tritium

Team: Shakotan (tech and operations), Xenous (data)

Key ecosystem interactions: Grants Committee, Beethoven (Marketing + Beets grants)

Summary

The initiative aims to further strengthen the DAO's presence beyond mainnet, focusing on Arbitrum, zkEVM, and Gnosis. The initiative emphasizes the successful execution of the Arbitrum STIP, but most of all development of strong competencies in creating data-driven narrative showcasing Balancer’s competitiveness, and collaboration with key blockchain partners such as Polygon and Aribtrum. The strategy includes adaptability to pivot based on market trends and performance metrics and an ever growing understanding of the KPIs that our grant providing partners care about.

Objectives

1. Timely STIP Execution: Ensure punctual and successful delivery of the current STIP, including consistent reporting and active engagement with the DAO.

2. Data Narrative Development: Work to build a competency within Balancer to tell stories about how we are using our emissions to drive growth for our protocol and in the ecosystems we exist in.

3. We should be able to put out velodrome style reports that tell our story.

4. KPI-Focused Program Management: Stay close to various grant programs and look at successful grant recipients to understand the KPIs they set and how they achieve them.

5. Propose changes at Balancer to make this possible or point out why we are not well suited to meet the kinds of KPIs that chain ecosystems see value in.

6. Next Grant Cycle Preparation: Identify potential grant sources for the upcoming cycle and strategize engagement.

7. Feedback Integration: Actively seek and incorporate feedback to enhance the effectiveness of the initiative.

8. STIP Comparative Analysis: Collaborate with the STIP body to assess and report on Balancer's performance in comparison to peers.

9. Impact Report Creation: Develop a comprehensive report detailing the impact of extra incentives delivered through balancer on L2 ecosystems.

10. Strategic Partnerships: Strengthen collaborations with Gnosis Chain, Base, Arbitrum and Polygon to share successes and apply learnings, particularly in the context of zkEVM scaling.

11. Collaborate with Beets as much as possible to create a shared competency here.

Initiative 2: Redesign of the Gauge Framework v1

Lead: Xeonus

Team: Shakotan (building automation), Tritium, Zekraken, Zen Dragon and Mike B (design)

Summary

This initiative aims to introduce an automated, dynamic system for evaluating and adjusting gauge emissions based on performance metrics. This new framework is designed to efficiently allocate BAL rewards, optimizing support for both high-cap and emerging projects. The goal is to ensure a more responsive and adaptable system that balances revenue optimization with nurturing potential future revenue generators.

Objectives

1. Automated Gauge Evaluation: Develop a system for automatic assessment of gauges based on predefined metrics.
2. Dynamic Emission Cap Adjustments: Implement a mechanism to adjust emission caps (ranging from 2% to 10%) based on gauge performance, potentially reducing underperforming gauges to a certain cap (e.g. 0.5%).
3. Adaptive Framework: Ensure the framework is responsive to market dynamics and capital efficiency, allowing for more flexible and efficient allocation of BAL rewards.
4. Rules around Duplication: Rules for handling the same Token in multiple pools/chains or the same DAO with multiple tokens.

Initiative 3: Support Balancer v3 Design

Lead: Mike B

Team: Xeonus, Zen Dragon, Tritium, Shakotan(tech and automation)

Key ecosystem interactions: Balancer Labs, Beethoven (Tech)

Summary: 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.

Objectives:

1. Onboarding of Innovative Teams: Attract and integrate teams that are developing novel automated market makers (AMMs) for Balancer v3.
2. Market Fit Identification for v3 Products: Assess and establish the market relevance of v3 offerings like TWAMMs, boosted pools, and dynamic ECLPs, and effectively pitch these to ecosystem projects.
3. Serving as a Liaison: Act as the primary point of contact for external teams working on Balancer v3, facilitating seamless communication and collaboration.
4. Technical Support Coordination: Collaborate with the integrations and BLabs teams to ensure that building teams receive adequate technical assistance.
5. Finalizing v3 Feature Scope: Conclude the initial feature set for Balancer v3, aligning it with market needs and developer capabilities.

Initiative 4: Automation ownership transfer & on-chain automation improvements

Lead: Shakotan

Team: Tritium

Key ecosystem interactions: Balancer Labs

Summary:

Ongoing automation for both on-chain and off-chain processes. Improving existing operational contracts, such as Gauge injector and improving Defender codebase so it becomes maintainable.

Objectives

1. OZ Defender automation takeover from Balancer Labs and Markus
2. Full tech and development for on-chain tasks
3. ChildGaugeInjector version 2 release with new features + factory deployment to support better events and data used by Data Team
4. Potential fees-handler-sc implementation to reduce rugability of the fees bags + improve data flow.

Service Provider Name & Overview: Balancer Maxis

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

Contributors (a.k.a. Ballers): Gosuto, Gleb, Cosme Fulanito and Dubstard

Pledge to abide by the DAO’s Code of Conduct: YES

Pledge to abide by the Accountability Guidelines: YES

Domains of Operation:

• Governance and Protocol Operations
• Strategy and Business Development
• On-Chain Operations (DevOps)
• Community Engagement
• Pool Design and Ecosystem Coordination
• Finance and Risk Management
• Data Analytics and Reporting
• Outreach and Anti-Scam Oversight

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

• Advise Foundation/OpCo on DAO Governance and BizDev

• Ecosystem council liaison addressing GRC inquiries

• Operational functionality within the DAO

• 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])

2. Strategy and Business Development

• Leading strategic partnerships and business growth initiatives.

• 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

• Arbitrum STIP grant program management and operations

4. Community Engagement

• Managing community interactions

• Onboarding new contributors and service providers

• Planning ecosystem meetups and events (onsites) and handling logistical arrangements

• Discord user support

• Weekly Newsletter (Medium)

• Governance Recap (Twitter) weekly

• Discord user support

• Weekly Newsletter (Medium)

• Governance Recap (Twitter) weekly

• Assisting in AMA sessions and coordinated marketing efforts.

• Engaging with community members on various platforms.

5. 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

6. DAO Treasury and Risk Management

• Overseeing budget, payments, and financial transactions.
• Due diligence for new service providers.
• Risk inventory and assessment with GRC

7. 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.

8. Outreach and Anti-Scam Oversight

• Leading efforts against scam activities within the Balancer ecosystem.

• Pen-testing of security infrastructure

• Take down of scam sites

• Services and subscriptions admin (Discord, Notion, etc.).

• Networking and outreach, bringing in new ecosystem participants.

• Facilitating communications and partnerships through various channels.

Length of Engagement & Budget:

Length of engagement: 3 months

Budget: 108’095 USDC, 35’718 BAL and 20 ETH

Impact on the Treasury

The Treasury currently holds ~4M BAL. Funding the Balancer Maxis for Q1 2024 would cost around 0.9% of the treasury’s BAL holdings, which annualizes to ~3.5% of the treasury’s BAL. The Treasury currently holds ~4.3M in USDC. Funding the USDC portion would cost around 2.5% of the treasury’s USDC, which annualizes to ~10%.

Furthermore, this table provides an overview of the last years impact putting this proposal into perspective:

Year	Quarter	BAL	BAL Price	USDC	ETH	ETH price	Operations cost	People cost	Total
2023	Q1	48000	$6	$0.00	0	1201	0	$266,400	$266,400.00
2023	Q2	42150	$7	$0.00	5	1795	8975	$291,257	$300,231.50
2023	Q3	26025	$5	$132,630.00	20	1853	37060	$251,825	$288,884.50
2023	Q4	31695	$3	$168,770.00	20	1652	33040	$271,779	$304,819
2024	Q1	35718	$4	$108,095.00	20	2170	43400	$250,969	$294,369

Although the Maxis will have around 1 FTE more manpower at their disposal, the impact on the treasury stays nearly the same. Maxis have undergone internal optimizations in pay to reduce the impact on the DAOs USDC as much as possible given the current market conditions. In that regard, 49.5% of requested funding will be locked in our stkauraBAL vesting contract. We will also roll over $37,720.00 in savings from our Q3 and Q4 budget (bizdev, bounties etc.) and deduct that amount from the current proposal, which further reduced our overall demand for USDC.

ETH Address to Receive Funds: 0x166f54F44F271407f24AA1BE415a730035637325

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

Technical specifications

The Balancer DAO multisig 0x10A19e7eE7d7F8a52822f6817de8ea18204F2e4f will interact with USDC 0xA0b86991c6218b36c1d19D4a2e9Eb0cE3606eB48 by writing transfer passing the Maxi Safe 0x166f54F44F271407f24AA1BE415a730035637325 as recipient and amount 108095 USDC as 108095000000.

Furthermore the Balancer DAO multisig 0x10A19e7eE7d7F8a52822f6817de8ea18204F2e4f will interact with BAL 0xba100000625a3754423978a60c9317c58a424e3D by writing transfer passing the Maxi Safe 0x166f54F44F271407f24AA1BE415a730035637325 as recipient and amount 35718 as 35718000000000000000000

The DAO Multisig 0x10A19e7eE7d7F8a52822f6817de8ea18204F2e4f will interact with WETH 0xC02aaA39b223FE8D0A0e5C4F27eAD9083C756Cc2 by writing deposit with amount 20 to wrap the required ETH. Afterwards the DAO Multisig 0x10A19e7eE7d7F8a52822f6817de8ea18204F2e4f will interact with WETH 0xC02aaA39b223FE8D0A0e5C4F27eAD9083C756Cc2 by writing transfer passing the Maxis Multisig address as the recipient 0x166f54F44F271407f24AA1BE415a730035637325 and amount 20000000000000000000