[BIP-799] Fund OpCo Product Team Q2/25

Service Provider Name: Balancer OpCo (Product Team)

Core Contributors: Alberto, Juanjo, Pon

Pledge to abide by [BIP-702] Balancer DAO Service Provider & Grantee Standards: Yes

Domains of Operation: Frontend software development

Introduction

Balancer OpCo Limited (or the “Balancer OpCo”) is a wholly-owned operating subsidiary of the Balancer Foundation. It is an integral element of the Balancer Foundation corporate structure supporting the Balancer DAO. It serves two primary functions (1) Administrative and Operational; and (2) Product Development.

Since the passing of BIP-55, the Balancer OpCo product development team has been a core team in the DAO since July 2022. This proposal aims to extend the product development services for the next quarter (Q2 2025), with significant changes to the team’s composition (see below). The Product team will be directly accountable to the Balancer OpCo and the Balancer DAO community through the reporting process applicable to all Balancer SPs, primarily with reference to the objectives and KPIs noted above.

As in the previous proposals, the administrative and operational elements provided by Balancer OpCo to the Balancer ecosystem are submitted as a separate proposal.

Retrospective

While Q4’24 was crowned by the launch of v3 to the world, OpCo started 2025 with sad news about Gareth and Anastas leaving the team in February, and Alberto giving notice of his departure in Q2. Beautiful things aren’t meant to last, and we are truly thankful for all the amazing work these guys have put into our ecosystem and our amazing frontend, but they wanted to pursue new challenges.

This proposal aims to downsize the team even further, relying on Beethoven’s expertise to lead the UI/UX efforts, and leaning more into Balancer Labs to assist with partner integrations. These changes are reflected in the current proposal with a much lower budget ask, and will be seen more effectively from Q3 and beyond.

Looking back to the deliverables in the last funding round (BIP-695), we consider objective #1 “Support the launch of the Balancer v3 protocol” and #4 “Frontend monorepo” fully completed, while objective #2 “New veBAL experience“ still needs some work and testing so we can fully ”Deprecate v2 UI & supporting infrastructure” in objective #3.

Length of Engagement & Budget

Balancer OpCo is requesting $113,602for 3 months of funding, starting Apr 1, 2025 and ending June 30, 2025.

The table below shows the applicable expense categories by quarter.

Cost Basis Breakdown

A further breakdown of the Balancer OpCo Product Team costs is shown below:

In addition, the Balancer OpCo is requesting an allocation of 5,000 BAL for the period of the proposal that aligns with the grants included in staff employment packages. This ongoing BAL grant is being awarded to current team members on a 4-year vesting basis, with a 1-year cliff, starting from each employee’s initial employment date in the ecosystem.

Should any of these employees leave before the completion of the period, any unvested BAL would not go to the departing employee and would be available to the OpCo for allocation as incentives to potential replacement staff.

Objectives and Key Results (OKR) Approach

The Product Development team ensures Balancer has a high-quality UI/UX available everywhere that allows users to interact easily with the Balancer protocol. In addition, the UI serves as a branding tool where people can better understand what the Balancer Protocol allows.

Q2/25 will be focused on onboarding/transitioning the new team, mainly focusing on supporting new pool types in V3 and improving user experience based on community and bizdev feedback loop.

Objective #1: Supporting new pool types

• Build, Improve and Optimize the canonical UI for interacting with Balancer: We aim to provide the best possible experience for users to provide liquidity, swap, lock veBAL, vote on gauges, and claim earnings using Balancer.
• Implemente new features or improvements made to the Balancer smart contracts to the primary UI for users to interact with them on launch.
• Design, build, copywrite and maintain the marketing pages for the Balancer protocol. The primary aim of these pages will be to inspire and help onboard potential partners into the ecosystem.
• Ensure this UI works across all modern devices including desktop and mobile browsers.
• Support the development and maintenance of the shared Beets/Balancer API. The Product Development team currently maintains the Balancer API at https://api.balancer.fi, which provides quick access to Balancer pool and token information.

Objective #2: Continuous improvement in user experience

• Optimize and improve this app so users have a great experience no matter how many features or how much data Balancer introduces in the future.
• Work on the stability and reliability of the UI by covering its critical functionality with unit and integration tests.
• Monitor relevant channels in Discord, Slack and Github issues for any reported problems and aim to respond within 24 hours and fix the problem as soon as possible.

Other OpCo operations

• Manage DNS for all Balancer DAO domains.
• Manage 3rd party accounts, upgrades, renegotiations, etc. For example, RPC providers, AWS, and wallet check providers.
• Github repositories: GitHub - balancer/frontend-v3: Official UI application for the Balancer protocol. GitHub - balancer/frontend-v2: Frontend app for the Balancer protocol (to be deprecated) GitHub - balancer/balancer-api: Deprecated (v2 API, to be deprecated) GitHub - balancer/tokenlists GitHub - balancer/metadata

In summary, Balancer OpCo’s product team is committed to building a market-leading DApp for the Balancer protocol and supporting growth opportunities through UI development as they arise. The product team are passionate about Balancer and committed to its long-term success.

Specification

If approved, The Balancer Foundation will allocate the resources above to the Balancer OpCo Limited frontend team. No additional transfers from the DAO Treasury are needed, and funds will be allocated from previous savings.