This proposal also appears on Balancer's forum.

The Proposal

The exchange gas reimbursement pilot will come to a close at 00:00 UTC on February 22. This proposal seeks to extend the program another four weeks, to end at 00:00 UTC on March 22. We would continue to allocate up to 7,500 BAL each week to the reimbursement of gas costs for swaps performed through the Balancer Exchange Proxy. It should be noted that three days still remain in the pilot, but at present about 20,000 BAL would still remain from that initial budget, and those tokens should be used toward the 30,000 BAL budget for this extension. The remainder will be taken from the Balancer Ecosystem Fund.

Motivation

The initial pilot has gone well. During its first 3.5 weeks, a total of 9332 BAL have been issued to 4568 recipients. Of these recipients, only 846 had held BAL before the start of the program, which indicates that distributing governance tokens to traders does indeed improve decentralization of voting power. This decentralization has always been one of the core goals of our liquidity mining program, but that program applies only to liquidity providers and not traders.

There has been some discussion on Discord about extending the program indefinitely, but first we need an opportunity to make refinements and collect more data to gauge the program's effect on core protocol metrics. Over the course of this four-week extension, we should be prepared to make structural modifications to the program (ratified by governance) to improve the user experience, which seems to be holding back many traders from participating. We should also, as a community, make a concerted effort to increase awareness of the program in order to grow the sample size of the data.

Mechanics

The overarching mechanics of the gas reimbursement pilot would not change. Please see the original proposal for details. Also refer to the program's expansion to all whitelisted tokens, which would remain in effect throughout this extended period.

Swaps between any two of the tokens on the whitelist would be eligible for reimbursement of gas costs, with limits described in the original post and summarized here:

• Only transactions between an EOA account and the Balancer Exchange Proxy would be eligible. This roughly correlates to end users navigating the Balancer Exchange UI and would not include DEX aggregators or most arbitrage bots.
• The maximum amount of gas to be reimbursed would be 100,000 units per swap, where there can be more than one swap in a single transaction (a swap is one leg of a multi-hop trade).
• The maximum gas price (in gwei) used would be the median price of all transactions within the enclosing block.
• Reimbursements would be made in BAL, not ETH, with the median BAL/ETH price from CoinGecko for the weekly period being used to convert.
• If the number of tokens to be distributed in a single week exceeds the 7,500 BAL budget, all reimbursements would be scaled down proportionally so that exactly 7,500 BAL are issued in total. However, there is room for flexibility here: the amount issued through Week N should never exceed N*7500; but if previously unused tokens remain they can be utilized. For example, if only 1,000 BAL are spent in Week 1 but Week 2 requires 10,000 BAL, then 2,500 BAL will be taken from the Week 1 budget and put toward Week 2 so as not to unnecessarily restrict the distribution for that week.
• Claims would be made available via the same MerkleRedeem contract currently used in the liquidity mining program and the gas reimbursement pilot. Reimbursements and liquidity mining proceeds for the week would be summed and be claimable in a single transaction.