Since our July update, our main priority has been to increase the decentralization of Balanced, and help the community become more involved in its direction.

We started by introducing the Balanced forum to begin community discussion on protocol changes, and we’re already seeing many high quality ideas and discussions taking place among our community members.

Now, we’ve added the ability for BALN holders to cast votes from the new Vote page. And made sure all BALN that’s staked or in a liquidity pool counts toward your voting weight. Learn how to participate in governance.

The first vote is to increase the reward threshold and borrow limit to 35% of your collateral value (from 20 & 25%, respectively). Voting starts on Thursday, August 5, at 1pm Eastern, and is open for 5 days. View the forum discussion.

Achievements in July

Decentralized governance:

Set up the Balanced forum
Designed and built the Vote page
Added multiple on-chain vote parameters to the smart contracts

We also…

Released a full pegging mechanism for bnUSD on the Testnet (to keep the price more stable)
Added a mechanism to give rebalancing kickbacks to borrowers
Worked on the trade routing functionality to allow direct swaps (will be on the Testnet this week)
Open-sourced the Balanced front-end repository
Pushed numerous quality of life improvements (bug & UI fixes, code refactoring, UI for claiming unstaked ICX, alert for when ICX balance is below 1, etc.)

Many thanks to our community developers, who contributed to many of these updates.

Focus for August

In August, we’ll continue to focus on governance functionality and enhancements to the BALN token economics, along with a few other features. Specific targets include:

On-chain votes and our first Balanced improvement proposals (BIPs)
Community-submitted votes on Mainnet
Full bnUSD pegging mechanism on Mainnet
Rebalancing against all borrowers (as opposed to batches of 50) on Mainnet
Continued testing of trade routing
Mockup of DAO financial statements for the Stats page
Mockup of enhanced BALN staking UX
Progress on smart contract enhancements for token economics upgrades
Progress on continuous BALN rewards
More quality of life improvements

The Balanced team is always looking for ambitious community leaders to join us. If you’re a front-end or smart contract developer who would like to work on Balanced, or want to integrate Balanced and/or bnUSD into your own product, reach out to @benny_options on Telegram to discuss next steps.

Many thanks to our community for your continued support and enthusiasm.