The Balancer Report: Powering up Governance with Snapshot
Decentralized governance is as unique and important as it is challenging. Its nature demands a balance between high efficiency and autonomous decision-making.
Ensuring that decisions are made swiftly and acted upon in time requires fine-tuned processes powered by transparent frameworks. There are plenty of important gears in the mechanism that facilitates that and one stands out in particular: Snapshot.
It ensures voter alignment and provides protocols with a transparent and accessible way to facilitate DAO voting.
This week we are exploring Snapshot’s role in powering governance votes across the ecosystem.
Decentralization is often characterized by increased importance of coordination. It doesn’t imply any central planning or anything of that sort, but rather indicates a need for a framework which would help facilitate voting and execute the results of governance proposals. On the most fundamental level this is exactly what Snapshot does. It is also much more than just that.
Snapshot offers a customizable voting space for protocols and DAOs that want to host governance votes for their communities. It allows participants to create proposals, vote on them as well as delegate governance power. Snapshot’s treasury tab has insights into the protocol’s treasury holdings.
Each individual proposal page has an “Information” section which outlines the main proposal parameters such as the voting system that’s used, the start and end dates as well as the snapshot block. It is accompanied by the “Results” counter which tracks individual votes and displays the final outcome.
Snapshot is also free and open-source. This has two key takeaways. The first one is straightforward: it makes the platform accessible to everyone. The other one is that the underlying mechanics can be reviewed and vetted by any independent entity to ensure that vote outcomes are communicated the right way. This second property shouldn’t be overlooked: DeFi prizes the open-source approach and Snapshot, as one of the driving forces behind decentralization, is leading the charge. The fact that it is used by the leading DAOs serves as a testament to Snapshot’s importance. There are over 34.000 total spaces and the list includes Balancer, Beethoven X, and Aura among other well-known DAOs.
DeFi rarely has one-size-fits-all approaches or standards accepted by the whole industry. This is especially true for the social layer, and Snapshot serves as a notable exception. It is open-source, easy to use and it is embraced by the leading industry participants.
Decentralized governance is crucial for the well-being of this space and Snapshot is here to support it. You can learn more about Balancer’s ongoing and past votes here.
Moving on to the latest ecosystem developments:
Balancer releases an X thread exploring core pools.
Core pools enable a self-sustaining flywheel which links TVL growth with dynamic incentives. This helps foster yield-bearing liquidity and long-term sustainability of all the pools of this type. There are two types of core pools: the first one features 8020 governance ones and the second type has pools where at least 50% of the tokens generate yield.
Sweep Protocol releases a deep dive into their reasons for building on Balancer.
They recently moved their SWEEP / USDC AMMs to Balancer and the pools are live on Ethereum, Arbitrum, Optimism, Base, Avalanche and Polygon. Sweep’s article highlights the flexibility of Balancer’s pool architecture. Their use of metastable pools allows Sweep to reflect their native token’s price movements precisely, something that wouldn’t be possible within any other pool type.
BeethovenX joins Hiddenhand.
The protocol will now facilitate their gauge bounty votes with the help of Hiddenhand, a leading voting marketplace. This means that ecosystem protocols can now use Hidenhand’s UI to distribute maBEETS bribes which in turn will lead to higher gauge emissions for their pools of choice. You can learn more about Hiddenhand in last week’s Balancer Report and also check out BeethovenX’s space here.
Savvy DeFi rolls out additional pool incentives powered by Balancer and Aura.
This will be facilitated by Hiddenhand. The incentives are to be distributed between $svUSD, $svBTC and $svETH LPs who stake their TriCrypto BPTs on Aura. Arbitrum is the chain of choice and the incentives will be allocated in Savvy’s SVY token.
As always, HiddenHand incentives can be explored here, the current round ends on January 11, 2023.
Balancer: TVL and Stats — Defilytica
Balancer’s Total TVL across all networks is sitting at $816,69m.
The Total Mainnet TVL is $507,62m with a dominance of 62,16%.
Speaking of protocol volume metrics, in this last week we were able to see a cumulative volume of $262,43m.
As for protocol fee metrics, we can verify cumulative fees of $202,95k.
As for our liquid wrappers, they are under the following parity to veBAL:
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.
- Mainnet — rETH / WETH — currently at 9.95%
- Mainnet — KNC / USDC / WETH — currently at 8.59%
- Arbitrum — GOLD / wstETH / USDC — currently at 5.35%.
You can find an overview of the current LM incentives on the Balancer Mainnet below:
This voting round is ending with 3 new Snapshot votes including the following:
- [BIP-525] Business Development Funding Proposal Q1–2024 and Retroactive Q4–2023 Funding
- [BIP-526] Pay BAL to DAO Multisig signers, H2–2023
- [BIP-527] Gauge Kill/Unkill for 2eur Pools
Stay tuned for this week’s Governance Recap to learn about the results.
This week Dubstard shares another set of security tips that will help you stay safe:
- Do not open any links sent to you in DMs from any one pretending to be a “mod”, “admin” “staff member” and etc.
- Do not message anybody offering help if you DMs them first, those are scammers.
- Remember, Balancer operates primarily under the following domain: https://balancer.fi/
- Never share private keys, seed phases with anyone.
- Remember, there is NO AIRDROP!
- There is no such thing as “Node RPC fix”, “Encrypt Wallet”, “Node Sync”, “Wallet Synchronization”, “Rectification”, “Remediation”, “Fee Reduction”, “NFT sync”, “Synchronize wallet” and so on. All those are fake sites and imaginary “tech” sounding reasons to bait users to visit the bogus sites.
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? Learn more here.
This article is for informational and educational purposes only. It should not be construed as investment or trading advice or a solicitation or recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any digital assets. Transactions on the blockchain are speculative. Carefully consider and accept all risks before taking action.
