Roadmap update | October 2021

In September, the Balanced contributors:

• Added a 'Funding' proposal type, so community members can propose and vote on ways to spend the DAO fund
• Added Balanced performance details to the Stats page
• Listed 2 new liquidity pools: USDS/bnUSD and CFT/sICX
• Launched 2 on-chain votes (BIP6 and BIP7)
• Fixed a vulnerability in the DAO fund that could have caused issues tracking the DAO fund holdings
• Pushed continuous BALN rewards to the testnet*
• Implemented transaction routing*
• Continued R&D on multiple collateral types
• Continued R&D on bBALN implementation
• Continued R&D on how to improve the rebalancing process

*We have to wait until the impending ICON2.0 migration is complete before we can release these features on mainnet. But more testing is never a bad thing.

Quality of life improvements:

• Added all new assets to the activity history
• Prevented people from being able to deposit or swap all their ICX, so they have enough left over to cover future transaction fees
• Added an indicator to the Vote page when there's an active vote you haven't participated in yet
• Added an exchange warning to the sICX send confirmation modal
• Added more frequent i-score claiming for the sICX management contract
• Fixed issues with proposals & votes submitted through the frontend
• Continued bug fixes for the rebalancing UI

DAO fund spending and performance details

We just released a new Funding proposal type on Balanced, so BALN holders can now propose to spend money from the DAO fund:

To help the community make informed spending decisions for Balanced, we've also published the Performance details page. View Balanced's income and expenses over certain time periods, and always see how much is in the DAO fund today vs another day of your choosing.

Like BIPs (Balanced improvement proposals), it's a good idea to discuss funding ideas with the community on the Balanced forum before you submit a proposal.

New collateral types

Supporting additional collateral types introduces unforeseen complexities. For example, there could be implications on the supply of bnUSD, which would affect rebalancing. We spent a lot of time in September considering all the implications of new collateral types and the type of collateral chosen. Here were some of the issues and considerations:

• Oracle source. The current architecture gets the price of an asset from the token itself. The sICX contract holds the value of sICX, but we can’t expect this from all collateralized tokens. We’re working on an Oracle Proxy contract to re-architecture this.
• Debt tracking. Debt is tracked in 'loop': a unit of measurement related to the ICX price, similar to a 'satoshi' for Bitcoin. This makes sense for ICX collateral, but not for new collateral types. To support a variety of collateral types, each asset should be compared to its USD value for easier calculation. Some collateral types might also 'rebase' (e.g. Omm interest tokens (oTokens) increase in number as interest is accrued), so we need to have a generalized architecture to handle this.
• Liquidation. The liquidation method needs to be adjusted for new collateral types. It only checks for sICX price and sICX collateral right now, so it needs to be generalized.
• Rebalancing. The rebalancing architecture needs to be reworked to rebalance different collateral types based on different circumstances.
• bnUSD supply. Additional collateral types will increase the bnUSD supply, which could have a negative impact on the peg of bnUSD against sICX. We need to consider the implications of adding a new collateral type, like BALN.

Boosted BALN

We made a lot of progress on the bBALN implementation in September. We researched Curve’s veCRV smart contract structure, which is written in Vyper, and wrote a 6-page report that outlines how the contract works and its various moving parts.

We've almost finished re-writing the code from Vyper to Java, so it's compatible with the ICON Network. Next up, we'll adapt the code to be Balanced specific, then begin testing on testnet.

Targets for October

In October, we’ll focus on turning much of our research and development into a reality:

• New collateral types on testnet
• Continuous rewards on mainnet
• Transaction routing on mainnet
• bBALN on testnet
• BIP6 (network fees distributed in BALN, bnUSD, and sICX) on mainnet
• Research and development into “live” voting for certain parameters (instead of Approve/Reject, you could enter an amount (e.g. the BALN % allocated to a liquidity pool), which is weighted across all voters to set the current value)
• UI/UX for adding new liquidity pools to Balanced
• Continued bug fixes and UI enhancements

If you have any questions or want to discuss these changes, join our growing Discord channel.