Direction Forward, User Growth, New Assets

#1

Hi BALN Stakers,

I have read the monthly improvements, still think there could be a thread for future growth and usage.

From what I can tell this is what’s happening in the ecosystem…

  1. Switching the smart contracts to Java.

  2. Bosted BALN to give more rewards and votes to owners willing to lock up their BALN.

  3. We are still deciding on whether to offer goodwill… How long will this topic continue to last in the community? This is obviously negative press for Balanced. We either need to offer goodwill or move on from the subject.

A good article on the situation is found here.

I believe it is very kind of everyone that owns Balanced to consider any type of goodwill.

  1. There may be other types of crypto and real-world assets added to Balanced in the future, should we consider starting with IDOT, IKSM since ICX seems to have an alignment with Polkadot? This will obviously show Polkadot users goodwill and they may decide to cross chains if we reward them on Balanced. Obviously, $ICE and $SNOW will be assets added soon.

  2. We have incredible “Workers” for Balanced and an intelligent community!

Post any positive news below, there has been a lot of hardship with the market crashes but I can see so much usage and growth in the future of Balanced:)

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#3

@BALNSupporter thanks for starting this thread. Happy to share my thoughts.

That’s up to the community of course. Anybody can bring any topic to discussion (within reason of course) and a vote (if the meet the criteria). From what I’ve seen, a few community members are working together to put together one more vote to disburse funds. That thread is here

In terms of User Growth, here is my 2 cents on the direction the DAO can go and what I personally am focusing on. As you’ve mentioned above, Java migration must come first, but I am thinking ahead.

1.) Stabalizing bnUSD, rebalancing mechanics, token economics etc. A lot has been learned since the launch of Balanced, and before trying to attract outside communities I think it would be best to stabalize some of the platform mechanics.

2.) Getting bnUSD added to other DEXes on other Chains - This requires BTP or some sort of token bridge, so for now, we are need to wait for further development of the ICON Ecosystem. It would be great to get an incentivized Curve pool for bnUSD, as an example.

3.) Adding assets from other networks with incentives - Same answer as above.

4.) Launch a cross-chain strategy - Waiting for BTP would be ideal, but in the mean time, there are other ways to launch a cross-chain strategy as seen with projects like SUSHI, Curve, Aave and Yearn. This will help build a larger community, but stabilizing platform mechanics would be important prior to this in order to maintain product consistency across networks.

Hope this helps get the juices flowing and gives you a few things to think about. Will monitor this thread for other thoughts/feedback.

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#4

The last goodwill proposal got 50%. I put my 200k BALN vote behind it (as it seemed more reasonable than the other proposals), but that wasn’t enough to push it across. It would be good to sort that out within the next few weeks at most with a new proposal appealing along the same angle. I’ve seen some fair comments for and against, but also a lot of salt and bs that wouldn’t fly on other platforms.

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#5

Any ETA for bBALN yet? I’m hoping to ladder stakes from 4yrs down to 6 months if possible. Rather not have all my eggs in one timelock.

Sidenote, its been great to see what’s happening with Craft and Gangstabet too. I think Craft staking atm might be outperforming BALN staking on average, but with everything down and no new assets via BTP yet its not that strange.

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#6

Good points here, I appreciate you sharing your viewpoint. I guess we will see what happens with the goodwill, either way, we need to be forward.

#7

Hey Benny,

Thanks for the feedback, very excited about the future direction of Balanced.

A few points I would like to add to your 4th point, INTERCONNECTIVITY—

I 100% agree BTP is going to be “ideal” to use in the future as “one option” for other communities to connect with ICON, but I also like how you mentioned becoming interconnected with other projects through other popular ways. I really think that is a smart way to connect with more crypto users. IMO, Balanced and ICON are run in an extremely professional manner, as more outside communities have the ability to cross-chain this will only lead to a larger more diverse community.

I have one suggestion… What is the chance of connecting and becoming a partner of Clover Finance? This is essentially on its way to becoming a super app (Cross Chain, Dex, NFT). They are all about interconnectivity and I am sure they would partner with Balanced if the current architecture of ICON’s blockchain allows it. I think that is key here, we need to be able to connect to other cross-chain options (give the option to use BTP), but spend a lot of time making sure we can connect with the current leading solutions.

More technical community members can check out Clover FInance (linked below) to see if a connection is possible for us? I think it could attract a larger userbase for Balanced. They obviously have large partners, but they are very proud to support up-and-coming projects and connect them to each other.

My main point is I know we are working on BTP, but let’s always stay current on the current leading and up-and-coming cross-chain solutions, that already offer cross-chain with many partners. Maybe others know of other partners besides Clover that offer cross-chain capabilities that would be a perfect fit for Balanced to partner with.

Here is the link for clover-

https://clover.finance/

#8

No specific ETA afaik, but the heavy-lifting is finished. Once the rest of the contracts are translated to Java, they’ll need to be adjusted to account for bBALN (i.e. governance needs to refer to bBALN not BALN).

I’m also hoping to include “live voting” with bBALN for BALN reward allocations. This would make it most similar to Curve and add the most value to BALN, as different projects would want to accumulate bBALN in order to direct BALN rewards to their own pools.

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#9

Overall, i am interested in a cross-chain strategy for Balanced, but it is indeed limited by ICON’s current bridge solutions. Right now there is only Orbit Bridge, which is a one-way bridge from ETH to ICON and only for token transfer.

I looked at Clover and it appears to be a substrate chain. Balanced could certainly deploy there, but in terms of interoperability I’m not exactly sure what you mean. I see they have a bridge to ethereum and a wallet that supports multiple networks similar to MetaMask but with a better UX (according to them of course haha)

Like I was saying earlier up, Sushi’s “cross-chain” strategy isn’t actually cross-chain, it’s just deploying the same app on many networks. It is tough to think about for Balanced, because we would have a different bnUSD on every network, which is not an ideal situation. Deploying the DEX like Sushi did is a bit easier, we would just need to wrap BALN from the DAO Fund and send it to the other chain for some temporary incentives.

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#10

Definitely can see your points here, I was more interested in bridges in lieu of stretching our coins on Balanced too thin. Clover is a heavily funded substrate project on Dot that is making progress connecting chains, just trying to keep my eyes open for potential partners that could attract some users to our DAO.

Have a great weekend!

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#11

Only other suggestion I have at the moment, looking at BALN token economics, I like them a lot overall. Would it be prudent to consider spreading out BALN rewards for the next 5 years instead of heavily rewarding over the next year and a half and then a very small inflation? Obviously, 30% API is strong, but don’t you think if we have 15% API on Baln/BNUSD and ICX/BALN for the next 5 years is better than API being extremely high now, then extremely low in 3 years? I think 15% is fair for today and the future. Stakers may only be getting 5% rewards atm.

Just trying to think of long term rewards to continue to motivate people to supply liquidity in the future instead of doing it heavily at the beginning and then moving to other platforms that offer better rewards in 3 years.

I like the tokenomics, don’t want more rewards, just to spread them out more for the long term.

#12

Benny,

I think some people talked about it before on this forum somewhere…. Is Balanced going to allow stakers to vote for PREPS of their choice, like OMM? In your opinion what are the pros and cons of this?

#13

There is nothing specifically in the roadmap but it is of course possible and something that could be done, but the community devs that I’m working with have other priorities right now

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#14

Yeah, makes sense, keep rewarding the core contributors as much as possible and for as long as possible would be my vote. We have a strong community and a great future ahead. I am invested with Balanced because the coin has so many use cases and the possibilities are endless. IMO, the most exciting coin, team, community out there.

Have a great day everyone!

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