Balancer

This proposal also appears on Balancer’s forum.

Polygon (MATIC) has seen strong user adoption this year with major DeFi projects like Aave, Sushi, and Curve all deploying there. The time has come for Balancer to join the party. The polygon team has agreed to pledge $5M worth of MATIC as rewards over the course of 8 weeks to be allocated at our discretion. Balancer Labs has taken care of deployment logistics and with the approval of BAL voters we can jump start liquidity with BAL + MATIC incentives. This proposal would allow the Ballers to allocate BAL + MATIC incentives to chosen Balancer pools on polygon. To match polygon’s $5M worth of MATIC, I propose we begin with a 25,000 BAL per week allocation which can be adjusted in the future at the discretion of the Ballers but not reduced below 25,000 until the initial 8 week matching period has completed. These 25,000 BAL would come from the fixed 145,000 weekly issuance, reducing the total L1 incentive to 120,000 rather than increasing BAL inflation.

Motivation

Other polygon deployments have been wildly successful. Recently Sushi has done more volume on polygon than ETH mainnet (check this thread and this tweet). Balancer brings a unique primitive to polygon by being the only flexible AMM. Forthcoming features like the stable swap factory will give us additional competitive advantages on polygon compared to ETH mainnet where similar products exist in the market. Based on my analysis of Sushi’s metrics, I believe we can also expect to exceed fees earned on ETH mainnet after a few weeks go by on polygon.

The Ballers plan to focus on multi-asset pools with higher fees and potentially building partnerships with polygon native projects. Any community input about pool composition or projects worth connecting with is greatly appreciated (#governance in discord).

25,000 is a sizable commitment but the potential opportunity is significant. I strongly believe we can generate more fees per BAL spent on polygon than we can with our current strategy on ETH mainnet.

Specification

If approved, the Ballers will immediately begin designing pools and assigning the BAL + MATIC rewards. As mentioned, the MATIC rewards would last for 8 weeks ($5M total over 8 weeks) and a minimum of 25,000 BAL per week would last for 8 weeks. After that, the Ballers can decide to adjust that number up or down (with community input!).

The goal is to vote this weekend and begin incentives on the 28th - pending any community discussion of course.