The Balancer Report
In the last week, and as always, Balancer kept building. And here, we update this report to all our followers and supporters.
Overview
The Total Mainnet TVL is $1.37B. The amount is $253.9M from V1 and $1.116M from V2. And we can see a slight drop of 0.7% compared to the $1.38B of the previous week.
The Polygon TVL is at $134.23M, registering an increase of about 28% compared to the $104.55M of the previous week. Balancer is currently the 3th largest DEX by TVL.
Arbitrum TVL is at $30.8M, registering a decrease of about 7% compared to the $33.3M of the previous week. And we can find Balancer in position No. 9 of the TVL ranking.
And finally, Balancer on Optimism by Beethoven X sits at $21.4M TVL, registering an increase of about 1.9% compared from last week's TVL of $21M.
Liquidity Mining
This section will list the top three expected pools to receive most of the next period’s emissions. Voting is open for four more days, and the next period is scheduled to start on Thursday at 00:00 am UTC.
Polygon - 20WETH-80BAL tetuBAL - currently at 37.56%.
Mainnet - wstETH / WETH - currently at 14.73%.
Polygon - WMATIC / stMATIC - currently at 5.86%.
You can find an overview of the current LM incentives on the Balancer Mainnet below:
Ecosystem
Orb is scaling global utilization of Balancer Protocol. Here's what they've been up to in October.
Balancer and Certora launch a security accelerator “to deliver a full integration suite for projects building on top of Balancer Protocol.”
Aura introduces Aura Migrator, “a one-click tool for bringing Uniswap & Sushiswap LP Positions to the purple coin ecosystem.”
DeFi safety reviews Aura and gives it an 88% rating.
Here are the current bribes at HiddenHand. The round ends on November 10, 2022.
Scam alerts
Dubstard shares his report for the month of October with us: https://dubstard.com/balancer/October2022/
Governance
Last week saw 5 votes on Snapshot with the following outcomes:
[BIP-103] Karpatkey Balancer Treasury CU Proposal Update [second vote]
The initial proposal was not approved so the Karpatkey team drafted an updated one.[BIP-104] Enable the STG/bb-rf-aUSDC Gauge [Optimism]
[BIP-105] Enable STG/bb-a-USD Gauge [Ethereum]
[BIP-106] Enable sfrxETH/wstETH/rETH Gauge [Ethereum]
[BIP-107] Retire TEMPLE/DAI & Enable TEMPLE/bb-a-USD 50/50 Gauge w/10% emissions cap [Ethereum]
Meeting the fam
In this section, we will be interviewing the different members of the team so that you can get to know them better. This week we have Xeonus!
What's your (educational/professional) background? And how many languages do you speak?
I have a PhD in Neuroscience and was working as a scientist for many years. During that time I had the privilege to work with incredibly intelligent people to develop new imaging technology to visualize neuronal activity in the living brain. That’s when I fell in love with coding and that was one of the reasons why I switched to IT consulting in 2018. I am now working as a software engineer on various customer projects where I am learning new things every day.
I speak Swiss-German (German dialect), German, (bad) French and English.
You built Balancer Analytics which is a crucial part of the ecosystem. Could you tell us more about the Analytics and your approach to it? And if there's anything else you're working on right now.
My intricate desire to get a deeper understanding of things led me to create Balancer analytics. For me this was quite a journey as my expertise lies in a different technology stack. Therefore, I was grateful to take over the code base from the talented Beethoven-X team as a starting point to build out the analytics site for Balancer. At first, I thought I could do the full-stack approach: build my own custom backend (subgraph) and extend the front-end that has already been built by others (Beethoven-X and Uniswap). I came to the realization that Balancer is such a unique (and complicated) protocol, it needs a completely overhauled analytics experience. I came to two conclusions: that I need to build a custom front-end from scratch and that I will rely on Balancer's subgraph solution so I can focus my energy on visualizing the rich protocol dataset as best as possible. I am currently working hard on building a new site right now. There is still a lot of work to do but I cannot wait to show you the new version soon!
It is noticeable that you are more active in tasks related to governance, how important you think they are for the community and the growth of the ecosystem.
One of the most exciting things about DeFi is that everybody can get involved and improve the protocol. Balancer’s governance is extremely active and I admire all the enthusiastic community members contributing new ideas. I think Governance is crucial for Balancer’s success and I urge everybody to pay attention to what is going on in the space. We are still at a very early stage in DeFi and I suspect many more (regulatory) challenges for us to tackle. I wanted to do my part and also relieve duties of other community members, that’s why I took over the management of Snapshot.
What does being a Maxi Balancer mean to you?
I think the name is very fitting: we are Balancer maximalists, always at the forefront of innovation and protocol improvements, making Balancer the best protocol to use. We live and breathe Balancer everyday!
Tell us your contributor story.
If somebody would have told me a year ago that I would at some point be deeply embedded in a DeFi project like this I wouldn’t have believed it! My story actually started out pretty harmless: I just wanted to make the life of LPs easier. Back in the day it was actually quite hard to identify good pools for liquidity mining. Additionally, Balancer went multi-chain and many aspects changed. That’s when I stepped in and proposed some documentation around liquidity mining (we didn’t have staking yet!) and I built a first simple page to visualize weekly liquidity mining rewards while helping out the community on Discord. At some point I was approached by solarcurve and joined the Ballers. After that, things picked up incredibly fast. I was involved more and more, built balancer.tools, had the idea to build analytics for Balancer and push the community development efforts. I also had the privilege to take a 3 month sabbatical from work to focus on building out the first iteration of analytics and learn more about the subgraph. Fast forward to now, I am a Balancer Maxi, board member at the Balancer foundation and grantee to my second developer project. Feels like multiple dreams came true! Next step is to go to DeFi full-time and leave the corporate world behind. But that is still far in the future for me right now.
What's your favorite thing about Balancer?
The combination of exciting technology and an awesome community!
What is the most positive thing about being part of Balancer DAO?
Interacting with so many intelligent people, being solution oriented, not having to deal or care about corporate structures while being a lean and passionate group of contributors.
How do you expect to see Balancer evolve in the near future? And how do you expect Balancer DAO to reflect those changes?
I see Balancer as a Product as a Service (PaaS). Many projects will build on top of Balancer. We are one of the core building blocks of DeFi. I suspect there will be a surge in institutional interest in DeFi, which we already see with the involvement of investors with Aave. Our partnerships (like Aave) will make us an incredibly powerful protocol. I would love to envision Balancer as one of the core protocols liquidity flows through. With an optimized fee model, we can fund talented people to further build out Balancer to become the leading DEX. We as a DAO should focus on reducing risk as well as paving the way for builders so that they can operate freely. Only in such an environment can we foster innovation to make Balancer future proof.
You are a role model to new contributors. How do you feel about that?
I feel absolutely humbled if that is the case. I myself just feel like a guy on the internet being passionate about DeFi and Balancer. I urge people who feel the same to just engage and use their talent to make Balancer great. That’s the beauty about this space: open to anybody with an internet connection, while being permissionless without imposing political or other doctrines on the individual's creativity!
Get involved
Balancer has a flourishing ecosystem. You’re welcome to contribute to it whether you’re a dev, a community person, or a graphic designer! We strive toward onboarding every new member in a smooth and personalized way.
Join the Ballers and start your Balancer journey now: http://discord.balancer.fi/
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