Motivation

As some have noticed, the CREAM/WETH gauge we recently approved has been allocated over 40% of BAL emissions. In concert with that, the swap fee on the pool has been set to 10%. This has exposed a hole in our gauge requirements that should be remedied for all past and future gauges. By setting the swap fee to 10% they are attempting to prevent trading in the pool in order to passively farm BAL rewards.

• For each gauge, the underlying pool’s owner must be set to Balancer Governance. If this is not the case, a very good reason must be presented in the gauge proposal

• If Balancer Governance is not the owner, any proposed change to the swap fee must be communicated to Balancer’s community in the #swap-fee-and-amplification channel in Balancer’s discord. This must be done at least 24h in advance of the change being made and the change can only be made if the Ballers (Balancer community contributors) are in favor.

Failure to adhere to these guidelines for existing gauges where the owner is not Balancer Governance will open the possibility for the Emergency subDAO to kill the gauge at their discretion if they believe the swap fee change to be malicious (causing liquidity to be unusable).

Risk

• The actor(s) performing these malicious actions together likely have enough voting power to vote down this proposal on snapshot. If they do that, I would petition the Emergency subDAO to kill the gauge and classify this as a governance attack. Up to the other six members if they agree with that assessment or not.

Specification

If approved, the above guidelines will immediately and retroactively go into effect. Due to the time sensitive nature, the vote will likely begin later today but discussion can and should continue while the vote is ongoing.