Balancer

Here's our 2023 Year in Review for Balancer.

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Balancer is one of the biggest AMM DeFi protocols out there. Balancer’s mission is to accelerate innovation in DeFi by providing access to secure infrastructure for liquidity applications.

Balancer Pools contain two or more tokens that traders can swap. Liquidity Providers put their tokens in the pools to collect swap fees. It adopts powerful features to slash gas costs, super-charge capital efficiency, unlock arbitrage with zero-token starting capital, and open the door to custom AMMs.

In light of the bear market, the Balancer DAO wanted to secure enough runway to keep developing its market-leading products, regardless of economic junctures.

Leveraging karpatkey’s experience in trustless asset management execution

Our extensive work with Gnosis made us come to the conclusion that higher levels of efficiency in DAO treasury management are better achieved through merging decentralised team members into a Treasury Core Unit, and that was the case for Balancer. Balancer Core Unit members were trained and assisted by karpatkey, observing strict security standards.

BIP-103 was passed almost unanimously, ratifying the creation of the karpatkey Balancer Treasury Core Unit, tasked with the following main responsibilities:

• Balancer Value Proposition: Improve the value proposition of Balancer and the Balancer DAO treasury;
• Availability: Increase Balancer’s availability on other networks and markets;
• Liquidity: Increasing Balancer’s liquidity so more traders and investors can acquire it with a lower price impact;
• Balancer Health Monitoring: Propose buybacks if we consider Balancer is undervalued;
• Fund Proposals: Any proposal involving funding will be comprehensively analysed by the Core Unit to plan how token transfers should take place in a timeline, and ensure that liquidity requirements are met and executed properly;
• Fund OPEX: Analysis and forecast of Balancer DAO’s operating expenses to meet liquidity requirements and make timely transfers if needed;
• Capital Optimisation: Monitoring and management of CDPs to prevent liquidation;
• Reporting: Dashboard development and maintenance to monitor investment yields, reward distribution, and overall treasury growth trend, health, and diversification; and
• Bridge Monitoring: Analysis of funds allocation to allow the Balancer token to be transferred across networks without friction.

karpatkey has proposed a list of allowed protocols and functions on the Balancer forum, which was later approved by the community on Snapshot. Target addresses and transactions’ call data associated with such objects were allowlisted in a smart contract so that the funds will always be under Balancer’s custody.