Since our August update, the Balanced contributors have been busy with numerous improvements to the product and smart contracts.

Added the ability for community members to submit votes
Listed 4 new liquidity pools: IUSDC/bnUSD, OMM/sICX, OMM/IUSDC, and OMM/USDS
Launched 4 on-chain votes (BIP2, BIP3, BIP4, and BIP5)
Pushed the full bnUSD pegging mechanism to mainnet, and made the rebalancing experience smoother for all borrowers (to learn more, see this Twitter thread)
Designed and launched the Balanced blog
Launched the Balanced Discord
Got Balanced, bnUSD, BALN, and sICX listed on CoinMarketCap
Got bnUSD, BALN, and ICX added to the P2PB2B exchange
Designed mockups for the DAO financial statements
Designed mockups for locking BALN to create bBALN

Quality of life improvements:

Added an expansion indicator to the wallet
Added a notification for when ICX has finished unstaking and is ready to claim
Reduced the time banner messages are visible for
Added BALN from liquidity pools to the voting weight
Added a percentage option to the Swap tab
Fixes for bugs, the activity feed, and ledger
Improved the risk ratio section at mobile
Fixed some bugs in the smart contracts

We're also:

Testing continuous block rewards
Doing research and architecture planning for bBALN
Working on multi-language support
Adding a notification to show when a proposal you haven't voted on is active

We covered a lot of ground this month, so let's dive into a few of the changes.

New liquidity pools

To support the launch of Omm, we released 4 new liquidity pools on August 31. One was IUSDC/bnUSD, which is now incentivized with 0.5% of the daily BALN.

The other 3 pools – OMM/sICX, OMM/IUSDC, and OMM/USDS – are incentivized by Omm Tokens, but the way you earn rewards for these pools is different. Learn how to earn OMM for supplying liquidity.

The release of these pools caused a huge spike in volume. According to Dapp.com, Balanced recorded several all-time highs on August 31 after the pools were listed, with 3,039 users and 62,072 transactions.

Voting

The Balanced DAO continues to set the standard for governance participation. Of the 4 on-chain votes, the lowest level of engagement was BIP4, with 934 voters and 56.58% of eligible BALN was used to vote.

Today we released the ability for community members to submit proposals. Until now, that responsibility has been left to the core contributors.

This release supports 6 proposal types:

BALN allocation: Adjust the distribution ratio of Balance Tokens.
Loan fee: Adjust the fee borrowers pay when they mint Balanced Dollars.
Network fee ratio: Adjust the ratio of fees paid to eligible BALN holders versus the DAO fund.
Loan to value ratio: Adjust the amount people can borrow against their collateral.
Rebalancing threshold: Adjust how tightly we should keep Balanced Dollars to its $1 peg.
Text: Suggest features and higher-level strategic decisions.

Before you submit a proposal, share it on the forum for the community to discuss, following the procedure outlined in the docs: https://docs.balanced.network/user-guide/participate-governance

To submit a proposal, you'll need to have staked at least 0.1% of the total BALN supply, and pay a 100 bnUSD fee.

DAO financial statements

As we’ve seen from the 4 votes held over the past month, the Balanced community is already highly engaged in governance. To help them make even more informed decisions, we decided to open the books and create an adjustable income statement and balance sheet:

The Balanced financial statements are already in development and will be released during September.

Boosted BALN

The community voted for BIP4, which requires you to lock up BALN to boost your earning potential. Now we're now working to implement it in a way that introduces as little complexity as possible.

We're still refining the details, but we expect the Home page to look a little something like this after the boosted BALN update:

We'll share a more in-depth post about the design before the changes are pushed to mainnet.

Targets for September

In the month of September, we’ll focus on token economics enhancements to BALN, add support for new collateral types, and a few other features. Specific targets include:

DAO financial statements live on the Stats page
Continuous BALN mining rewards on mainnet
Initial bBALN implementation on testnet
Transaction routing on mainnet
New collateral types on testnet
Rewards category for staked BALN on testnet
Enhancements to smart contract architecture
Progress on Java contract development
Additional community proposal types, including spending from the DAO fund
More quality of life improvements

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