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 $1.02B. The amount is $205.9M from V1 and $819.7M from V2. And we can see a slight drop of 1% compared to the $1.03B of the previous week.
The Polygon TVL is at $81.33M, registering a decrease of about 7,1% compared to the $87.61M of the previous week. Balancer is currently the 4th largest DEX by TVL.
Arbitrum TVL is at $17.65M, registering a decrease of about 15,5% compared to the $20.90M of the previous week. And we can find Balancer in position No. 10 of the TVL ranking.
And finally, Balancer on Optimism by Beethoven X sits at $16.62M TVL, registering a decrease of about 3.5% compared from last week's TVL of $17.23M.
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 34.82%.
Mainnet - wstETH / WETH - currently at 13.94%.
Polygon - WMATIC / stMATIC - currently at 6.75%.
You can find an overview of the current LM incentives on the Balancer Mainnet below:
Ecosystem
What are Composable Stable Pools? This thread takes a deep dive into them.
In a Twitter space we talked about the Importance of Self-Custody with Element Finance. Listen to it here.
Frax Finance is now part of the Balancer ecosystem!
Beethoven X details some of their recent developments.
Are boosted pools DeFi’s biggest secret? Learn more about them and check out a Beethoven X example in the linked article
The latest grantee of Balancer Grants was @Skytale5 ! The team is returning to add functionality to the Balancer SDK. Don't miss the full article.
Here are the current bribes at HiddenHand. The current round ends on November 23, 2022.
Scam alerts
Dubstard shares a couple more fake Balancer addresses to avoid.
Governance
Last week saw only 1 vote on Snapshot with the following outcome:
[BIP-112] Adjust Balancer Snapshot for Aura AIP-17.
Here are the changes that the proposal introduced that were ultimately rejected:
Change the Balancer Snapshot Voting to no longer include the aura-balance-of-vlaura-vebal strategy.
Update the quorum on future votes to be 3 million veBAL.
Extend all Balancer Snapshot votes by an additional 48 hours (120 hours in total) to provide AURA additional time to run a meta-snapshot. This will also ensure that balancer governance ends during the week in all timezones.
Future snapshots will therefore start on Thursdays and end on Tuesdays.
Meeting the fam
We know that you know a lot about the ecosystem. But what's your (educational/professional) background?
My background is mainly in trading. I entered crypto in mid 2017 since the bull market created a lot of great trading opportunities. During the subsequent bear market I took an online course in javascript/React which led me to making my first contributions at Balancer. I’d say a basic understanding of programming is a very valuable thing to have for anyone trading/working in DeFi. Beyond that, I guess I’m just very good at learning and researching things. No real professional training.
Your first message in the Balancer discord dates back to June 2020, could you tell us about your contributor journey?.
I was a heavy DeFi user since early 2018 when I moved off CEX’s completely pretty much. I learned about Balancer as the token launch approached and I was already LP’ing on the protocol before the token hit. It was a great generalization of Uniswap v1 (no v2 at the time) and I fell in love with all the possibilities. I wasn’t satisfied with the UI so I built my own version of a Balancer pool explorer which was enough to win me a small grant from the team. I remained active in the discord and was one of the original Ballers when they decided to start that initiative. There wasn’t much to do until the launch of v2 when the Ballers took over the management of the liquidity mining program.
I favored optimizing for protocol revenue and activating the protocol fee to accumulate a diversified treasury of eth/stables/governance tokens. I was overruled though and I stepped away from the LM program. It wasn’t until the end of ‘21 when the Ballers had grown quite a bit and the new DAO started to form that I started getting more involved. veBAL put an end to the LM program and infighting in the DAO led to a transition to the “Service Provider” model we enjoy today. Any group can apply for funding from the DAO on their own terms and voters will decide. This led to the formation of the Maxis who owned all previous responsibilities held by the DAO. Since then Maxis have proven to be a powerful force for growing Balancer and personally I really enjoy what we do and the great people I get to work with.
You did a lot for Balancer governance, such as promoting the proposals [BIP-19] and [BIP-57], which had a significant impact. How important is governance for the community and the ecosystem's growth?
Governance is very important. Our governance is a bit clownish but I hope things will improve and we’ll look back on this as a painful transition period to something better. For now we all do the best we can to work together.
What does being a Balancer Maxi mean to you?
There’s no better group of people to work with imo. We have a long list of responsibilities that are vital to ensuring Balancer continues to operate. Everyone has their own part to play in that and I’m continuously impressed with the skill of execution of the other Maxis. I’m very proud and grateful to have such great people around me and I know Balancer will not be the same if the Maxis cease to exist. The name “Balancer Maxis” is a fitting one because all of us believe Balancer is the “one dex to rule them all”. We won’t rest until Balancer is the undisputed top DEX in the world.
While there are no hierarchies in the DAO, leaders naturally emerge. How do you feel being a reference for the rest of the community?
DAO’s are a very new thing. I took inspiration from places like Yearn where there’s minimal hierarchy and people collaborate to find the best way forward. I didn’t try to be the leader and instead left a lot of room for others to find their own ways to contribute. I guess you could say it didn’t end well but on the other hand the Maxis were born from that chaos. I still think it’s very important to minimize the framing of “leaders”, anyone and anything should be fair game to question. I view Balancer as a relatively flat organization, very rarely are decisions simply handed down from above. There’s always the opportunity for discussion and considering all views.
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/
Are you looking for a grant? Please fill this form out, and we’ll get back to you with the next steps.
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