Roadmap update | December 2022

Balanced Official -

During November, the contributors focused on the last major upgrades for the year: arbitrary contract calls, live voting for liquidity pool incentives, and an interface for ICON Bridge. There have also been several governance votes, with more expected in December.

Here’s what the Balanced contributors accomplished in November:

Smart contracts

  • Deployed arbitrary contract calls via governance on mainnet
  • Deployed live voting and bribing on mainnet
  • Updated DEX fee processing to take fees only in quote tokens (view the forum discussion)
  • Added protocol-owned liquidity methods to the DAO Fund

Front end / back end

  • Updated the proposal UI to display the smart contract details for greater transparency
  • Updated the Vote page to support live voting
  • Continued to refine and test the ICON Bridge interface in preparation for launch

Quality of life and code improvements

  • Fixed a bug that prevented the ‘new vote’ indicator from appearing
  • Added an option for users to choose their existing unlock date when locking up more BALN
  • Refactored the DAO earnings to include the Stability Fund and query by block height
  • Added bBALN APY, bBALN holders, and BALN locked to the Stats page
  • Fixed an OutOfStep error that occurred when adding liquidity to the ICX/sICX pool
  • Updated the user-facing docs to support live voting

All Balanced development progress can be tracked in real-time by following our pull requests, open/closed issues, and commits in the Balanced Github repo.

Governance update

Over the past week, voting has been open for two governance proposals.

Both proposals were submitted through the smart contracts while the app gets updated to support the new arbitrary contract call functionality.

Governance has so far been limited to specific actions defined in the smart contracts. Thanks to the work done on arbitrary contract calls, you can now call any method on any smart contract — including those unrelated to Balanced — which unlocks limitless governance opportunities.

Potential ideas include:

  • Use assets from the DAO Fund for protocol-owned liquidity
  • Move sICX from the Reserve Fund to the DAO Fund for better tracking and other use cases
  • Add BUSD from ICON Bridge to the Stability Fund
  • Lower the swap fee for sICX -> ICX to improve bnUSD arbitrage
  • Adjust the ratio of fees split between liquidity providers and the DAO Fund for sICX -> ICX swaps to match other pools

If you’d like the DAO to pursue these ideas or want to suggest some of your own, start a discussion on the Balanced forum.

ICON Bridge interface

After ETH is approved as a collateral type, bnUSD will be backed by two cross-chain assets. But BTCB has had minimal adoption in the 2.5 months it’s been available to use as collateral, because cross-chain transfers still have too much friction.

To support Balanced’s cross-chain collateral types, the contributors are finalising an ICON Bridge interface so you can transfer assets without leaving the app. You can look forward to its appearance on the Trade page in the coming days.

Liquidity incentives

Live voting is now live on the Vote page.

As a recap, live voting gives bBALN holders the ability to influence the amount of BALN that incentivises each liquidity pool, in order to attract more liquidity. You’ll be able to delegate bBALN voting power to your preferred liquidity pools, and adjust the amount every 10 days.

The liquidity pool incentives will be updated once a week to reflect the total bBALN allocated to each pool, starting from December 16 (UTC).

The new liquidity incentives section on the Vote page.

Initially, you can only vote for the 7 liquidity pools that already offer BALN incentives, but votes can be proposed to support additional liquidity pools, like BTCB/bnUSD and ETH/bnUSD. If there’s a pool you'd like to incentivise, start a proposal discussion on the Balanced forum.

Boosted BALN update

Since the release of BALN on October 31, 11.1M BALN have been locked in 768 wallets. There are 5.16M bBALN, giving an average lock-up time of 1.86 years.

However, 1.9 million BALN are still staked. If this includes some of yours, lock it up to hold voting power and earn a share of the network fees. View this tweet thread to get started, and learn more in the docs.

Monthly performance

In the month from 8 November – 8 December, Balanced earned $18,605 from fees:

  • 1,558 bnUSD from loans (+168% from the previous month)
  • 6,117 bnUSD from the Stability Fund (+1,010%)
  • $10,930 from swaps (+128%)

$11,163 of that was distributed to bBALN holders, giving bBALN a 30-day trailing APY of 20.88%.

It's the second month in a row that Balanced has recorded an uptick, this time a 214% increase from the previous month.

Balanced’s income and expenses over the last 2 months.

The DAO Fund increased by $14,575 – a 1.04% gain – to leave a total balance of $1,418,859 based on current market prices.

The amount held in the Balanced DAO Fund compared to the previous month.

Balanced wallpapers and NFTs

This month’s roadmap design, Vortex, has been added to the collection of Balanced wallpapers.

The animated version has been added to the Balanced NFT collection on Craft.

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If you’d like a chance to win the Vortex NFT, retweet the roadmap announcement on Twitter and tell the community what action(s) you’d like the DAO to propose with the new governance tools.

The winner will be announced 7 days after publishing.

Goals for December

During December, the contributors will finalise the interfaces for ICON Bridge and arbitrary contract calls, but will otherwise take some much-needed time away from new feature development.

Smart contracts

  • Remove rebalancing and replace with simple redemption (view forum discussion)
  • Code clean-up
  • Explore potential governance ideas with the Balanced community

Front end / back end

  • Launch the ICON Bridge interface
  • Add arbitrary contract call support to the app
  • Begin work on the Balanced website and Stats page upgrades

If you have any questions or want to discuss these updates, start a discussion on the Balanced forum or in the Balanced Discord channel.