Babylon Finance: Gardener’s Digest #20

June 10th, 2022

Amplify

Published in

Babylon.finance

7 min readJun 11, 2022

📖 Overview

Gardener’s Digest is a weekly newsletter highlighting updates and news in the Babylon Finance ecosystem.

📢 News

New Heart of Babylon Epoch & Mechanics 🫀

Since its inception, the Heart of Babylon has returned 173% APR. In order to survive the bear market and provide sustainable treasury income during uncertain times, Babylon is proposing changes to the allocations and staking structure within the Heart, including a more sustainable “infinite epoch” similar to the veCRV model.

Starting June 10th, users will be able to designate their own lock times according to their conviction in the protocol. Babylon wants to reward users with long-term convictions. As such, the proposed changes will be as follows:

New Epoch lock times & voting power changes:

6 months: No bonus. Baseline voting power.
1 year: 2% extra hBABL when depositing. 2x voting power per hBABL.
2 years: 4.5% extra hBABL when depositing. 4x voting power per hBABL.
4 years: 10% extra hBABL when depositing. 8x voting power per hBABL.

These extra hBABL rewards will only be active until July 15th. Voting boosts will always be applied.

Babylon’s treasury is also attempting to incentivize the acquisition of stablecoins. To this end, the Heart of Babylon will introduce DAI bonds with a 10% discount on hBABL.

In addition to these changes, the allocation for heart pumps is changing. Notably, 45% going to the treasury to rebuild a bear market war chest, and 20% going towards internal Garden investments. These investments directly increase the share price of these gardens, and can be seen as a dividend from the Heart to all members in the voted gardens.

Previously, all strategies in the Heart had to be closed and reopened every 2 months at the end of each epoch in order to facilitate withdraws which increases gas costs, lowers capital efficiency, and could potentially force the Heart to sell at inopportune times. Now, the Heart will have more flexibility in its ability to direct capital and earn a return for its members.

Read more from the official announcement here.

Investment Funds for DAOs

Babylonian and Medium author

detopia

has written an excellent summary of benefits and use cases for Babylon’s gardens that other DAO treasuries and investment arms can take advantage of. A summary of the article is below.

🗳️Manage your Treasury in a Decentralized Manner
Many DAO’s have a managed treasury used to create income for their protocol. In their current form, however, they are plagued by centralized decision-making and Key Man risks. Babylon allows anyone, even entire DAO’s, to create investment clubs with varying levels of control.

Garden creators can choose to whitelist deposit addresses and strategists, allowing for a private investing environment. Or they can opt to make everything public, allowing others to invest alongside the activities of their treasury and even upvote/downvote the implementation of strategies.

🚀Supercharge your tokenomics with out-of-the-box mechanics

- Add your token as collateral with Babylon’s Gold Lender.
- Add “vote escrowed (ve)” support to your token.
- Enable your entire treasury to become yield bearing.
- Use built-in token buybacks to increase token value. Profits from finalized garden strategies are automatically swapped back into your reserve asset.

🧱Build a Garden that is Active, Passive or a blend of both:
As described above, a DAO with an investment fund on Babylon allows its members to be as active as they like, proposing and voting to implement a plethora of strategies from over 15 different DeFi integrations.

A DAO can also choose to create a portfolio of investment strategies from existing Gardens in Babylon to create a more passive solution. In Traditional Finance we’d call this a Fund of Funds. This allows the DAO and its members to access active strategy yield with passive effort.

To learn more, be sure to check out: https://www.babylon.finance/daos

You can read the complete article here.

BABL Token Referral Program 🤝

The referral program that is allocating 10k BABL tokens to the three verified gardens is still ongoing. Users can share in the success of the protocol by helping to onboard new users & build wealth together. For every $5k referred, you will both share 1 BABL token.

As part of BIP-16, deposits into these gardens when gas is under 125 gwei are100% free to the user, and subsidized at 50% above 125 gwei.

Read more and follow the user guide to get your referral link in the official announcement here.

Custom Integration Bounties🔌

Now you can connect Babylon to any DeFi protocol and/or custom logic. Babylon released their SDK, allowing anyone to develop an adapter, test it on a private garden and then submit it to be verified and audited by Babylon governance.

Babylon has created a wishlist of integrations with a $5k bounty awarded to whoever successfully integrates these protocols. Here is a link to the regularly updated integration wishlist. The first person that successfully completes each of these integrations will receive up to $5k in developer bounties paid in BABL.

Read more from the official announcement here.

📜 Governance

BIP-20 Idle Finance Bounty 💰️

With the release of Babylon’s SDK, anyone can create a custom integration with Babylon. As a result, a Babylon member “adamb” completed an integration for idle.finance. The proposal includes sending Adam 250 BABL tokens from the treasury as a bounty for completing this integration.

This proposal has been executed on chain and Adam has received his BABL tokens.

BIP-22 Heart Reloaded 🫀

This proposal attempts to restructure how the Heart of Babylon functions. Please read the write up above, as well as the official announcement here. A summary of changes are below.

Global Parameters:

15k BABL will be allocated from the treasury to satisfy discounts and bonds. Any amount not used will be returned to the treasury on July 15th.
APR: Baseline Target APR of 30%. Use safer strategies. Mining Reward program will give twice the rewards to Heart strategies.
Capacity: 150k. Increase to 150k.
Lock Period: 6 months — 4 years. Up to 10% reward and 8x voting boost.
Bond Program: Add DAI bond with 10% Discount.

As for the fee split:

BABL Buybacks: Decrease to 10%
BABL-ETH Liquidity: Decrease to 10%
Garden Investments: Increase to 20%
Fuse Pool: Decrease to 10%
Treasury: Increase to 45%
Shield: Increase to 5%

Members in the Heart of Babylon can vote gas-free, here.

📈 Stats

TVL & Users 🌱

Babylon Finance currently has $16.33M in TVL and has created over $262K within 97 different Gardens for their 1,598 users

Babylon’s Treasury is currently holding $2.7M in assets.

Heart of Babylon Tracker 🫀

The Heart has performed its weekly buyback and reallocation on 06/11/2022:

- 16.4 BABL were purchased as buybacks (30%)
- Sent 1.12 ETH back to the treasury (10%)
- Added ~$400 in Liquidity to BABL-ETH (25%)
- Invested $800 into gardens (15%)
- Added $400 in liquidity to the Fuse pool (20%)
- Added 0.69 ETH to the Shield (5%)

https://etherscan.io/tx/0x21845f827b075c43f385eb48ba2ca8eaee5b1eacef5be16b2726f61d33f02755

🌴 Participate in the Babylon Ecosystem

Learn more about Babylon Finance and join your first garden here: https://www.babylon.finance/

If you want to join us on our mission to help people create wealth through DeFi, please visit our Discord.️ If you own DAI, USDC, ETH, BTC, BABL or AAVE there already exists a garden on Babylon where you can deposit your passive holdings and start earning the BABL token. BABL mining rewards are accrued based on the capital invested, the duration of the investment, and the performance of the strategies once finalized.

🌱 Partner with Babylon

Babylon allows any user to create their own investment club on chain using the reserve currencies we’ve made available, WETH, WBTC, DAI & USDC. However; through a partnership with Babylon, we can create a custom garden for your treasury using your DAO’s native token. Join us today and start building revenue for your treasury with transparent, audited DeFi strategies.

More information about partner gardens can be found here.

🧠 Become a Manager/Strategist on Babylon

As a strategist, you can receive up to 10% of the profits (varies per garden) + 10% extra BABL rewards. Learn more about BABL rewards here.

More information about strategists can be found here.

📞 Community Calls & Twitter Spaces

Babylon Finance hosts Q&A sessions on Discord and Twitter spaces to talk about all things Babylon. Follow us on Twitter and join our Discord to stay up to date on the next community call.

Questions? Read the FAQ: https://docs.babylon.finance/getting-started/faq

Need help? Follow our User Guides: https://docs.babylon.finance/getting-started/user-guides