Allowlist Aura Finance in Balancer VotingEscrow

This proposal appears on Balancer's forum

Summary

This proposal is to whitelist Aura Finance in Balancer’s VotingEscrow contract allowing Aura Finance to lock BAL (in the form of 80/20 BAL/WETH BPT), participate in Balancer governance, and provide additional rewards to Balancer ecosystem participants without immediate disposal of BAL rewards.

Abstract

Aura Finance is a protocol built on top of the Balancer system to provide maximum incentives to Balancer LPs and BAL stakers through social aggregation of $BAL deposits and Aura’s native token $AURA .

For BAL stakers, Aura provides a seamless onboarding process to veBAL , by creating a tokenised wrapper token called auraBAL that represents the 80/20 BPT locked up for the maximum time in VotingEscrow. This can be staked to receive existing rewards ( $BAL and bbaUSD revenue) from Balancer, in addition to Aura system revenue in the form of $BAL , and additional $AURA . Users can trade their auraBAL back to BAL at any time through a deep StablePool BPT.

For Liquidity providers, Aura abstracts away complexity of the Balancer gauge boosting system, providing a smooth onboarding process to all Balancer gauge deposits. Aura allows depositors to achieve a high boost through the protocol owned veBAL while also accumulating additional $AURA rewards.

BAL locked in Aura will be taken out of circulation “Ad vitam æternam”. Being aligned with the DAO is our goal, with this implementation seeking to be fully symbiotic.

$AURA & Governance

Aura Finance also proposes the $AURA token to act as a governance and incentivisation tool within the ecosystem. Locked AURA tokens will have governance rights in the system and will be able to vote using the protocol owned veBAL voting power. The goal of $AURA is to create a flourishing ecosystem on top of Balancer.

With great power comes great responsibility... The protocol is expected to control a large stake of the veBAL voting power. This has a huge economic power as it effectively controls the flow of Balancer incentives over the next 20 years. It is therefore important that this control is fully decentralized. Aura has added vote delegation to the system to allow this to take place fully on chain. Once the voter base has sufficiently matured, control will be passed from the starting 4 of 7 multisig, to a suite of on chain contracts.

The Aura Voting contract has support for EIP1271 meaning that the results of on chain votes can be forwarded to Snapshot to participate in Balancer governance. This transition should take place as soon as the Aura voting contracts are battle tested and the voter base has matured (~3-4 months post launch).

Amuse Bouche - Without giving too much details, here is a quick overview of high level AURA distribution:

• 50% Balancer LP rewards Rewarded pro-rata for BAL received on Aura
• 10% for StableSwap auraBAL/BPT over 4 years
• 5% for Aura/ETH incentives
• 17.5% Treasury vested
• 2.5% bootstrapping token holder base*
• 1% for future incentives
• 2% BAL treasury over 2 years
• 2% system bootstrapping incentives
• 10% for the Aura team over 2 years
• 100% Fair launched no VC - Seed investors

*Voting positively on the allowlist proposal will have an additional 2-3x boost in the bootstrapping phase based on their BAL balance

The release schedule for AURA is thus depicted as follows:

Team

The Aura team comprises DeFi builders and pioneers with a track record of delivering.

Aura Finance is currently undergoing an audit with Peckshield, and is planning to conduct two further audits with top tier firms.

Proposal specification

It is proposed that the Balancer multisig add a smart wallet checker on the veBAL contract, and subsequently whitelist the depositor contract provided by Aura Finance following a successful proposal. The Balancer team would manually review this contract before whitelisting.

In the interests of keeping Aura 100% fair launch and with no VCs, it is also proposed that the Balancer treasury DAO provide the Aura treasury with a $300k grant in order to reimburse for audit costs and to be spent on further security (e.g. codearena).

SPEC

Allowlist the following contract on the veBAL smart_wallet_checker once available: 0xaf52695e1bb01a16d33d7194c28c42b10e0dbec2

Links

https://www.aura.finance Twitter

If this vote passes, the DAO Multisig eth:0x10A19e7eE7d7F8a52822f6817de8ea18204F2e4f will initiate a transaction with 0x7869296Efd0a76872fEE62A058C8fBca5c1c826C calling the function allowlistAddress with the argument 0xaf52695e1bb01a16d33d7194c28c42b10e0dbec2