Renew Funding for the Ballers

This proposal also appears on Balancer's forum.

Introduction

For those who don’t know, the Ballers are a group of long term community contributors to Balancer Protocol. This proposal will feature messages from the Ballers about their activities to give the community some context around analyzing the value of this proposal. Under the current framework the Baller program is being funded in three month increments. Our current round of funding is set to expire November 1st, 2021. Over the last few months, the program has grown significantly in member count and scope. Commensurate with this growth is an increase in the funding cost. Currently the Ballers operate with no hierarchy - it is up to each Baller to determine their level of “Ballery” (full or half or none) and their level of engagement.

I have taken the role of distributing the Ballery so I check in with each Baller every month to see what they’re up to and if they have any feedback/concerns. We’ve also adopted bi-weekly Baller Round Table meetings to better coordinate amongst ourselves. I asked each Baller to write up a bit about what they’ve been doing recently so the community has some context to frame the discussion around this proposal - note this was up to each Baller to determine if they wanted to write anything or not.

You can see the list of currently active Ballers here. This is updated to be reflective of the next three months.

Notable changes compared to the previous three months: Tongnk is going from half Ballery to none as he’s primarily focused on grants where he’s directly compensated. Andrea, Mike B, and Xeonus are moving from half to full as the scale of their contributions have increased.

Baller Active Roles & Contributions

Please see the forum post referenced at the top of this proposal. This section was too large to fit in the snapshot vote.

Conclusion & Specification

With a proposed roster of thirteen active Ballers (five full, eight half) at the current rate of 500 BAL per month for full and 250 BAL per month for half with 60% fully unlocked after two years (1 year cliff, 1 year linear vesting) and 40% liquid immediately, the total cost of funding for the next three months is as follows.

1,800 BAL per month in liquid payments * 3 = 5,400 BAL 2,700 BAL per month in vested payments * 3 = 8,100 BAL

In addition, I request 300 BAL as a spending fund to reward notable community contributions and fund any small projects the Ballers might need funding for.

Total: 13,800 BAL

If approved, the ecosystem fund will distribute this amount to a wallet I control. The Ballers desire to re-use existing vesting contracts, so the vested amounts for each Baller would be fully released in October 2023. I will work with Mike McDonald to make a contract for any Baller who does not have an existing vesting contract with a fully vested date that matches the existing ones.