Balancer

Summary:

This Forum post requests 3 gauges for pools that introduce our new graviAURA wrapper, that should each be run under a separate snapshot:

AURA/ETH/graviAURA (33/33/33)

To support deeper AURA liquidity for traders seeking to buy/deposit into graviAURA.

auraBAL/ETH/graviAURA (33/33/33)

To support both auraBAL and graviAURA liquidity and utility and to provide swapping auraBAL with industry standard routing over ETH.

BADGER/graviAURA (80/20)

To drive value to BADGER

Here is the multisig ticket around seeding initial liquidity in these pools:https://github.com/Badger-Finance/badger-multisig/issues/580

Governance Process Request:

As this is the first gauge vote that AURA voters can vote on. BadgerDAO requests that the snapshot for these gauges be extended to last 5 to 7 days in length in order to give the parties involved time to educate their user-bases about how to engage in this governance.

References/Useful links:

Badger Websitehttps://badger.com/gravity

Aura Website:https://www.aura.finance

Badger Documentationhttps://docs.badger.com

Aura Documentation:https://docs.aura.finance/

Badger Github Pagehttps://github.com/Badger-Finance/vested-aura

Badger Communityhttps://discord.gg/bfcYzbqeKC

Governance Forum:https://forum.badger.finance

Governance Snapshot:https://snapshot.org/#/badgerdao.eth

Protocol Description:

BadgerDAO is launching a new set of products focused on ve ecosystems under a new Product Division called Gravity. The first Gravity product isgraviAURA.

graviAURA is a wrapped vlAURA token with bribe harvesting features similar tobveCVX, Badger’s liquid vlCVX token, which has been live and managing upwards of 2m CVX/vlCVX for the past 9 months. bveCVX is a well established DeFi product, with a 9 month history of successfully managing locking, unlocking, liquidity and orderly withdrawals. The new graviAURA product is a fork of bveCVX, extended with new balancer specific features designed to allow DAOs and other token based projects and communities to create and sustain liquidity. This feature can be described in one sentence as follows:

The vote weight from graviAURA tokens in a Balancer pool with a gauge is used to vote for the pool the tokens are in.

This solves the free rider problem. By including graviAURA in a pool, all depositors in said pool are voting for it equally. You cannot siphon yield from the pool by depositing and not voting. graviAURA automates locking of tokens, locking on a weekly cadence. Deposited tokens, as well as any unlocked tokens from a given week, can be withdrawn until the next lock. Additionally, gauges will provide limited liquidity when there is no AURA available for withdrawal.

Motivation:

graviAURA is designed to help DAO’s create liquidity. Part of the bootstrapping plan for graviAURA involves supporting an ecosystem pool for at least the first 3 months. We would like to launch the ecosystem pools, as well as a BADGER pool, as our first graviAURA gauges.

We expect each of these pools to maintain a base natural yield even without external voting, due to the fixed weight of graviAURA(and hence underlying vlAURA) in each of the pools that will consistently vote for them. Note that some external driver will be required to bootstrap pools with initial self-voting capital or incentivize an increase in the size of the pool.

As soon as these gauges are up, BADGER will make the following changes to our voting and farming strategies around balancer:

• All free votes controlled by the BadgerDAO Treasury will initially be split between these 3 pools.
• All POL farming BAL will be moved from the BADGER/WBTC pool to the BADGER/graviAURA pool. (assuming all 3 gauges pass)
• Any fucoolture bribes will be directed only to graviAURA pools, and if possible offered on an Aura focused bribe market.

Specifications:

Governance:
BadgerDAO has a hierarchy of different multisig accounts that handle operations within the DAO. These have specific use cases and are outlined in detail in the repo linked here:Badger Multisigs.The highest risk operations are controlled by a timelock address which needs to be triggered and has a 2 day time delay to perform any actions.

The Badger Multisig maintains governance over the contract, and can redelegate the votes to a new EOA should the wallet be compromised. The potential risk of this centralized element of the system is therefore the misdirection of all graviAURA votes for 1 voting round.

Oracles:

Badger does not rely on any external oracles

Audits and review:

Vaults 1.5 Quantstap audit:https://github.com/Badger-Finance/badger-vaults-1.5/blob/main/security/audits/Badger Vaults 1.5 - Quantstamp - Jan 2022.pdf

C4 contest for graviAURA strategy:https://code4rena.com/contests/2022-06-badger-vested-aura-contest [public results pending cool off period]

C4 contest results for bveCVX strategy (upstream repo of graviAURA):https://code4rena.com/reports/2021-09-bvecvx/

Additional audit results can be found on badger.com underSecurity & Audits.

Centralization vectors:

Badger utilizes upgradeable contracts for many of the products we offer. Badger upgradeable contracts are protected by a 2 day timelock… Our API and frontend are hosted by centralized entities, but we are developing a fully permissionless IPFS hosted access point primarily intended for strategy development.

**Note:**Due to the snapshot voting element of AURA and the requirement to automatically calculate and regularly re-vote during rounds, voting is currently controlled by an EOA. This EOA sits in a secure keystore that is only accessible to 2 senior members of the Badger team and the bot which runs the voting script. Badger will work with Aura over time to decentralize snapshot voting as much as possible, and has an active workstream focused on removing centralization risks around automated snapshot based voting.

Market History:

AURA, graviAURA and auraBAL are all new tokens focused on the balancer ecosystem and currently do not have significant liquidity or trading history. The purpose of these gauges is to help build that. Eth is a well known token with proven market history that is easy to find.

Badger: Is the governance token of BadgerDAO. It has currently been trading in an 80/20 BADGER/WBTC balancer pool that can be found here: BADGER/wBTC 80/20 Pool. The treasury maintains additional Protocol owned liquidity on both Curve and Uniswap V3, and BADGER is well traded across a number of centralized exchanges, including FTX, Binance and Coinbase.

33graviAURA-33WETH-33AURA gauge

0x7598a96271700f20a542fa69857f0b59d6c162e4