Balancer

This proposal also appears on Balancer’s forum.

The Ballers are a group of passionate Balancer advocates whose primary goal is to build an engaged community around the protocol. That can take many forms and I encourage anyone who wants more context to give this update I recently published a quick read: https://davis-ramsey.medium.com/the-ballers-summer-update-b3fd24cf55b9

Motivation

Recently Fernando suggested we increase the “Ballery” from 100 BAL/month to 500 BAL/month with 60% long term vested (1y cliff, 1y linear vest period via Sablier) and 40% liquid. This was met with broad support on an informal basis. Ballers have the option to take a full or half Ballery and you can see the current breakdown of who’s taking what here: https://www.notion.so/63091677228841de9fa909139e60362f?v=a7852fc9da684a5a834934e5215edd6d

This is the most members the Ballers have ever had, and commensurately I expect the program to execute and deliver positive results in the community more effectively than we ever have. It is important to have oversight and to be accountable for the spend - the grants committee is 3/5 Ballers so we wanted to avoid the appearance of impropriety by going to them.

On that note, grants committee members also get paid 200 BAL per month liquid. Given I selected a full Ballery for myself and I also plan to serve on the grants committee, I will forfeit my grants payment back to the grants pool as a full Ballery alone is a significant amount.

Specification

The liquid portion of the Ballery has been fully funded for the next 3 months, we only need to fund the vested portion of the payments this time. Three months from now, I will make a proposal to fund both the liquid AND vested portions for the following three months.

We need 5,400 BAL to fully fund vested Balleries for the next 3 months. I think it’s also important for the Ballers to have a spending fund we can use to reward community members who distinguish themselves on an ad-hoc basis and to run some community events like the POAP design competition. Thus I will ask for an even 6,000 BAL with 5,400 going towards vested Ballers and 600 going to the Baller spending fund (requires 2 ballers to agree, I custody funds secured by my ledger wallet).

I will coordinate setting up the vesting contracts with Fernando.