DeFi

• Aave Proposal; Asset Listing Framework (Market Risk) and Community Consensus Check

  • Since Gauntlet and the Aave protocol started working together, we have gotten requests from the community to examine asset listings. Community members, programmers, and other stakeholders frequently questioned us about things such, "How liquid should this asset be in order to be listed? What should the asset's default settings be? How can we prevent the protocol from going bankrupt?"

  • The architecture for Gauntlet focuses primarily on market risk and how Gauntlet will assist the Aave asset listing process. You may find our framework right here. The current asset listing system for Aave will function in combination with this.

  • The protocol's expansion depends on asset listing. Aave must list and delist assets to preserve its effectiveness as a protocol when new assets in DeFi flourish and more dated ones lose favor. With two weeks' notice and significant community support, Gauntlet will carry out these risk analyses before the listing of new assets.

  • In particular, we advise setting the initial listing's LTV and Liquidation Threshold to 0. In other words, once an asset is listed, it cannot later be utilized as collateral. Assets with non-zero LTV and liquidation threshold have historically been listed by the community. This Snapshot vote aids community consensus on future best practices because there are dangers in doing so.

• Aave Proposal; Ban Hackers from Transferring Community Contributing Members 4500X AAVE

  • The author of this proposal thinks that members of the AAVE community who contribute ought to be safeguarded. According to the author, in the event of a hack, innocent users who can produce sufficient proof should be protected, not hackers who can be used to debate so-called decentralization.

  • The author suggests two strategies in this case:

  • The AAVE.com administrator denies access to 0x56c125b4ccbb130288198710efe574da0496d8fe; he must present acceptable proof of the monies' source.

  • Either stop his transfers or put a permanent freeze on the pool.

• Aave Proposal; Risk Parameter Updates for Aave V2: 2022-08-18

  • By balancing the risks of different assets, this collection of parameter updates aims to preserve the protocol's overall risk tolerance.

  • The optimization function that balances the three primary criteria of insolvencies, liquidations, and borrows utilization is what determines what parameters Gauntlet should use. This objective function is optimized for by parameter recommendations. 

  • Asset volatility, asset correlation, asset collateral use, DEX/CEX liquidity, trading volume, the anticipated market impact of trades, and liquidator behavior are just a few examples of the large range of diverse input data that our agent-based simulations employ and that change every day. Gauntlet's simulations elucidate intricate connections between various inputs that defy straightforward heuristic expression. 

  • As a result, the input metrics we display below can aid in understanding why some of the parameter recommendations have been made, but they should not be regarded as the whole justification. Other significant data from our simulations that can be used to investigate intriguing inputs and outcomes are covered on the various collateral pages on the Gauntlet Risk Dashboard.

• Balancer Proposal; [BIP-43] Redeem Treasury FEI for USDC

  • The Balancer Treasury currently holds 2,515,349.77 FEI, which was the result of a treasury swap that took place in October 2021. The DAO was supposed to spend these monies for operational costs under the terms of the original agreement. 

  • The author believes that now is a good moment to convert the FEI into USDC so that the DAO can utilize it later to cover expenditures without having to convert the FEI every time the DAO pays out since the SP's passed thus far require payment in USDC.

• Balancer Proposal; [BIP-44] Support Balancer Space delegation on Snapshot for vlAURA holders

  • This proposal proposes to replace the voting power that is delegated on-chain using the vlAURA contract with the raw vlAURA balance in order to bring the Snapshot approach in line with the original expectations for space-based snapshot delegation.

  • It suggests employing one layer of delegation rather than two, to put it simply.

  • There are various causes for this transition, including:

  • With one delegation as opposed to two tiers, it is easier to calculate voting power.

  • For Balancer proposals, vlAURA holders have the option of delegating to Balancer delegates rather than Aura delegates.

  • Many vlAURA holders use voting marketplaces like Hidden Hand to delegate their votes, and they could want to overrule their votes on Balancer proposals.

• Balancer Proposal; [BIP-45] Balancer LP BAL into MLP

  • As part of a recent governance proposal, Tracer DAO recently changed its name to Mycelium and broadened its strategic focus. The ecology of Mycelium has included Balancer significantly and will continue to do so. We are developing technologies that will use BLP tokens to gather stable coins and other assets to serve as collateral in Perpetual Pool markets. Balancer acts as the secondary market for pool tokens for the Perpetual Pools.

  • Mycelium is introducing a Perpetual Swap product next week. A generalized fork of GMX is the end product. The community of Balancers is asked to consider allocating a portion of the BAL held in the Balancer Treasury to the MLP liquidity pool. Mycelium will target a 25% APR to LPs for the first month following debut as an incentive to LPs. MLP owners will receive 70% of the fees made by traders. Holders of MLPs will receive payment for these fees in ETH. If the APR derived from ETH incentives falls short of the desired 25% APR, the difference will be made up with escrowed MYC, the native token of Mycelium, which vests over a six-month period.

  • The purpose of this proposal is to generate ETH and MYC rewards while diversifying the Balancer treasury and depositing BAL into the MLP liquidity pool. The result would be the yield on liquid treasury assets for the Balancer community. As we introduce Mycelium Perpetual Swaps, $200,000 worth of BAL would help seed liquidity into MLP and allow traders to meaningfully go long BAL.

• Balancer Proposal; [BIP-46] Enable SILO/ETH Gauge on Ethereum

  • The Silo lending market uses a bridge asset concept to let users lend and borrow any asset in a risk-isolated manner. Token owners recently approved a plan to distribute 130k vlCVX as incentives for the SILO:ETH Balancer pool. The core team will utilize 130k vlCVX to procure bribes, sell them, and then use the money to bribe owners of veBAL.

  • With the purpose of max-locking and routing $CRV and $CVX emissions to the SILO:FRAX v2 gauge, SiloDAO first bought about 260k CVX. For a few reasons, the solution hasn't lived up to what the community expected:

  • Despite offering a high APY (about 130% at its peak), we were unable to draw much liquidity, which led to high slippage.

  • Despite the high APY, it's possible that the stablecoin (Frax) pairing deterred LPs from making a deposit.

  • Most price aggregators, such as CoinMarketCap, do not read curve factory pools, and DEX aggregators do not route through them either (e.g. 1inch).

  • SiloDAO will be able to create a key source of liquidity for our token by rewarding liquidity by activating a gauge for the SILO:ETH Balancer pool. 

  • As a result of Balancer's far greater integration with price and DEX aggregators, in our opinion, it is a more practical choice. LPs are exposed to lower IL when using an ETH pairing as opposed to a stablecoin. Last but not least, once lit, the Tokemak reactor in the Silo can move liquidity to the Balancer pool provided the two protocols are integrated.

Creator Economy

• SuperRare Discussion; Can a StopMotion artist become an SR artist?

  • This question is posed to see if StopMotion Artist can be featured on SuperRare.

  • At the moment no one has replied to his artist who has been applying for over 10 months now to be featured on SR.

  • This also begs the question on what types of artists are allowed on SR and which ones are not.

  • If you come across this post please feel free to reply and give your personal insight into this artist and add to the discussion on who should be featured and why.

• Bankless Tempcheck; L2 Liquidity Deepening

  • This temp check is proposing to migrate 50k of liquidity from Sushi and Balancer to the L2 Balancer pool to avoid slippage for AMM operations

  • The current daily volume on the Balancer Pool on Polygon is $1,000 a liquidity depth of $46,000.

  • The steps behind the proposal would be as follows:

    • BDAO multisig would unpair the Sushiswap liquidity.

    • The multisig would unpair a portion of the Balancer Liquidity (1217788 BANK and 3 ETH ≈ $25,878)

    • The multisig would then migrate the total amount of assets to Polygon via the Treasury Guild Bridging Service (TBS) to the Polygon multisig (X ADDRESS)

    • Finally the multisig would deposit the assets into the Balancer pool at an 80/20% ratio.

    • The Sushi assets (50/50) would be auto-balanced to the 80/20 ratio.

Infrastructure & Tooling

• Rocket Pool Discussion; Bankless Q4 sponsorship proposal

  • This discussion raises the question of whether or not to continue to fund the sponsorship of Bankless

  • Rocket Pool currently pays $78,000 per month to Bankless and receives 2,000,000 impressions per month

  • Some points to discuss are as follows:

    • Bankless’ niche DeFi audience is growing over time

    • Ads could be changed to focus on other specific topics

    • There will be increased attention on Staking post-Merge

    • A low-risk way to deploy funds at scale in case of insufficient alternatives

    • Q4 could feature additional marketing initiatives to produce campaign synergies

    • Diminishing returns from running ads repeatedly to what is largely the same audience

    • Does not directly target the main pain points of volume rETH demand & volume

    • Difficult to model attribution & track some marketing metrics (such as CTR & CPA)

    • Opportunity cost if funds can instead be deployed on other initiatives

DeFi

• Aave Proposal; Asset Listing Framework (Market Risk) and Community Consensus Check

  • Since Gauntlet and the Aave protocol started working together, we have gotten requests from the community to examine asset listings. Community members, programmers, and other stakeholders frequently questioned us about things such, "How liquid should this asset be in order to be listed? What should the asset's default settings be? How can we prevent the protocol from going bankrupt?"

  • The architecture for Gauntlet focuses primarily on market risk and how Gauntlet will assist the Aave asset listing process. You may find our framework right here. The current asset listing system for Aave will function in combination with this.

  • The protocol's expansion depends on asset listing. Aave must list and delist assets to preserve its effectiveness as a protocol when new assets in DeFi flourish and more dated ones lose favor. With two weeks' notice and significant community support, Gauntlet will carry out these risk analyses before the listing of new assets.

  • In particular, we advise setting the initial listing's LTV and Liquidation Threshold to 0. In other words, once an asset is listed, it cannot later be utilized as collateral. Assets with non-zero LTV and liquidation threshold have historically been listed by the community. This Snapshot vote aids community consensus on future best practices because there are dangers in doing so.

• Aave Proposal; Ban Hackers from Transferring Community Contributing Members 4500X AAVE

  • The author of this proposal thinks that members of the AAVE community who contribute ought to be safeguarded. According to the author, in the event of a hack, innocent users who can produce sufficient proof should be protected, not hackers who can be used to debate so-called decentralization.

  • The author suggests two strategies in this case:

  • The AAVE.com administrator denies access to 0x56c125b4ccbb130288198710efe574da0496d8fe; he must present acceptable proof of the monies' source.

  • Either stop his transfers or put a permanent freeze on the pool.

• Aave Proposal; Risk Parameter Updates for Aave V2: 2022-08-18

  • By balancing the risks of different assets, this collection of parameter updates aims to preserve the protocol's overall risk tolerance.

  • The optimization function that balances the three primary criteria of insolvencies, liquidations, and borrows utilization is what determines what parameters Gauntlet should use. This objective function is optimized for by parameter recommendations. 

  • Asset volatility, asset correlation, asset collateral use, DEX/CEX liquidity, trading volume, the anticipated market impact of trades, and liquidator behavior are just a few examples of the large range of diverse input data that our agent-based simulations employ and that change every day. Gauntlet's simulations elucidate intricate connections between various inputs that defy straightforward heuristic expression. 

  • As a result, the input metrics we display below can aid in understanding why some of the parameter recommendations have been made, but they should not be regarded as the whole justification. Other significant data from our simulations that can be used to investigate intriguing inputs and outcomes are covered on the various collateral pages on the Gauntlet Risk Dashboard.

• Balancer Proposal; [BIP-43] Redeem Treasury FEI for USDC

  • The Balancer Treasury currently holds 2,515,349.77 FEI, which was the result of a treasury swap that took place in October 2021. The DAO was supposed to spend these monies for operational costs under the terms of the original agreement. 

  • The author believes that now is a good moment to convert the FEI into USDC so that the DAO can utilize it later to cover expenditures without having to convert the FEI every time the DAO pays out since the SP's passed thus far require payment in USDC.

• Balancer Proposal; [BIP-44] Support Balancer Space delegation on Snapshot for vlAURA holders

  • This proposal proposes to replace the voting power that is delegated on-chain using the vlAURA contract with the raw vlAURA balance in order to bring the Snapshot approach in line with the original expectations for space-based snapshot delegation.

  • It suggests employing one layer of delegation rather than two, to put it simply.

  • There are various causes for this transition, including:

  • With one delegation as opposed to two tiers, it is easier to calculate voting power.

  • For Balancer proposals, vlAURA holders have the option of delegating to Balancer delegates rather than Aura delegates.

  • Many vlAURA holders use voting marketplaces like Hidden Hand to delegate their votes, and they could want to overrule their votes on Balancer proposals.

• Balancer Proposal; [BIP-45] Balancer LP BAL into MLP

  • As part of a recent governance proposal, Tracer DAO recently changed its name to Mycelium and broadened its strategic focus. The ecology of Mycelium has included Balancer significantly and will continue to do so. We are developing technologies that will use BLP tokens to gather stable coins and other assets to serve as collateral in Perpetual Pool markets. Balancer acts as the secondary market for pool tokens for the Perpetual Pools.

  • Mycelium is introducing a Perpetual Swap product next week. A generalized fork of GMX is the end product. The community of Balancers is asked to consider allocating a portion of the BAL held in the Balancer Treasury to the MLP liquidity pool. Mycelium will target a 25% APR to LPs for the first month following debut as an incentive to LPs. MLP owners will receive 70% of the fees made by traders. Holders of MLPs will receive payment for these fees in ETH. If the APR derived from ETH incentives falls short of the desired 25% APR, the difference will be made up with escrowed MYC, the native token of Mycelium, which vests over a six-month period.

  • The purpose of this proposal is to generate ETH and MYC rewards while diversifying the Balancer treasury and depositing BAL into the MLP liquidity pool. The result would be the yield on liquid treasury assets for the Balancer community. As we introduce Mycelium Perpetual Swaps, $200,000 worth of BAL would help seed liquidity into MLP and allow traders to meaningfully go long BAL.

• Balancer Proposal; [BIP-46] Enable SILO/ETH Gauge on Ethereum

  • The Silo lending market uses a bridge asset concept to let users lend and borrow any asset in a risk-isolated manner. Token owners recently approved a plan to distribute 130k vlCVX as incentives for the SILO:ETH Balancer pool. The core team will utilize 130k vlCVX to procure bribes, sell them, and then use the money to bribe owners of veBAL.

  • With the purpose of max-locking and routing $CRV and $CVX emissions to the SILO:FRAX v2 gauge, SiloDAO first bought about 260k CVX. For a few reasons, the solution hasn't lived up to what the community expected:

  • Despite offering a high APY (about 130% at its peak), we were unable to draw much liquidity, which led to high slippage.

  • Despite the high APY, it's possible that the stablecoin (Frax) pairing deterred LPs from making a deposit.

  • Most price aggregators, such as CoinMarketCap, do not read curve factory pools, and DEX aggregators do not route through them either (e.g. 1inch).

  • SiloDAO will be able to create a key source of liquidity for our token by rewarding liquidity by activating a gauge for the SILO:ETH Balancer pool. 

  • As a result of Balancer's far greater integration with price and DEX aggregators, in our opinion, it is a more practical choice. LPs are exposed to lower IL when using an ETH pairing as opposed to a stablecoin. Last but not least, once lit, the Tokemak reactor in the Silo can move liquidity to the Balancer pool provided the two protocols are integrated.

Creator Economy

• SuperRare Discussion; Can a StopMotion artist become an SR artist?

  • This question is posed to see if StopMotion Artist can be featured on SuperRare.

  • At the moment no one has replied to his artist who has been applying for over 10 months now to be featured on SR.

  • This also begs the question on what types of artists are allowed on SR and which ones are not.

  • If you come across this post please feel free to reply and give your personal insight into this artist and add to the discussion on who should be featured and why.

• Bankless Tempcheck; L2 Liquidity Deepening

  • This temp check is proposing to migrate 50k of liquidity from Sushi and Balancer to the L2 Balancer pool to avoid slippage for AMM operations

  • The current daily volume on the Balancer Pool on Polygon is $1,000 a liquidity depth of $46,000.

  • The steps behind the proposal would be as follows:

    • BDAO multisig would unpair the Sushiswap liquidity.

    • The multisig would unpair a portion of the Balancer Liquidity (1217788 BANK and 3 ETH ≈ $25,878)

    • The multisig would then migrate the total amount of assets to Polygon via the Treasury Guild Bridging Service (TBS) to the Polygon multisig (X ADDRESS)

    • Finally the multisig would deposit the assets into the Balancer pool at an 80/20% ratio.

    • The Sushi assets (50/50) would be auto-balanced to the 80/20 ratio.

Infrastructure & Tooling

• Rocket Pool Discussion; Bankless Q4 sponsorship proposal

  • This discussion raises the question of whether or not to continue to fund the sponsorship of Bankless

  • Rocket Pool currently pays $78,000 per month to Bankless and receives 2,000,000 impressions per month

  • Some points to discuss are as follows:

    • Bankless’ niche DeFi audience is growing over time

    • Ads could be changed to focus on other specific topics

    • There will be increased attention on Staking post-Merge

    • A low-risk way to deploy funds at scale in case of insufficient alternatives

    • Q4 could feature additional marketing initiatives to produce campaign synergies

    • Diminishing returns from running ads repeatedly to what is largely the same audience

    • Does not directly target the main pain points of volume rETH demand & volume

    • Difficult to model attribution & track some marketing metrics (such as CTR & CPA)

    • Opportunity cost if funds can instead be deployed on other initiatives