Logo

[BIP-20] Funding Proposal for Orb Collective

Balancer

The Balancer Foundation is pleased to share the funding proposal for Orb Collective, which represents the top talent in these particular areas, drawn from the BLabs team and externally, and now organised under an independent structure that is accountable directly to the Balancer Foundation and the BalacerDAO.

The substance of the funding proposal has been authored by the Orb Collective team. The Balancer Foundation fully supports this proposal.

__

Authored by Jeremy, Meghan, Rabmarut, Alan, Curtis, Pon, Elissa

Proposal Framework

Service Provider Name & Overview: Orb Collective - please see below for more.

Leader(s): Jeremy, Aleks, Wei, Meghan, Rabmarut, Alan, Curtis, Pon and Elissa.

Pledge to abide by the DAO’s Code of Conduct 1 7 (or link to your own): Yes.

Pledge to abide by the Accountability Guidelines 3 6: Yes.

Domains of Operation: Partnerships, Marketing, Integrations, Design, and People Operations.

Key Objectives & Success Metrics: Please see below.

Length of Engagement & Budget: One year - August 2022 through July 2023.

ETH Address to Receive Funds: 0x3B8910F378034FD6E103Df958863e5c684072693

Link to SLA (if going through the Foundation): https://ipfs.io/ipfs/Qmajx2eBG2kNiawrSXDn7PiAav44zTjpGZUdWFJmhksrgM 24

TL;DR

Announcing the formation of Orb Collective, an independent entity created by a team of former Balancer Labs and Balancer DAO contributors. Orb is an experienced and passionate team of professionals who have been dedicated to propelling Balancer’s growth. Orb Collective’s mission is simple: to scale global utilization of the Balancer Protocol.

We believe that a protocol’s success emerges from a strong interdependent relationship between its core technology and its ability to promote and spread usage of the technology. If one side fails, the project cannot make its impact on the world.

Orb presents a solution for promoting the growth of the Balancer Protocol through a tightly aligned mix of partnerships, marketing, integrations, design, and people operations work.

Partnerships create growth opportunities through mutually beneficial collaborations with other projects. Integrations execute the technical implementation of those opportunities and build technology to enable further opportunities at scale. Marketing spreads awareness of those opportunities to the world and builds a strong brand that is recognized and trusted by end-users and partners. Design illustrates the messages conveyed by marketing and creates experiences for end-users and partners that are clear, smooth, and enjoyable. People Operations ensures that all of these processes function well within a communicative ecosystem of individuals who are supported in doing their best work.

This proposal provides an overview of the work that Orb Collective proposes to perform for the Balancer Foundation and a budget that we are requesting for a time span of 12 months (4 quarters), to be paid quarterly so that funds are not provided if work was not completed for the previous quarter.

Overview

Decentralization of the Balancer ecosystem

Since its inception, Balancer’s stated vision 1 has been to exist as a decentralized protocol and form a DAO that does not rely on central points of risk or influence.

Launched in Spring 2020, Balancer’s groundbreaking technology and passionate contributors have allowed it to grow into a blue-chip DeFi protocol and home to a developer community of incredible teams such as Aave, Fei Protocol, Element Fi, Yearn, Lido, CopperLaunch, Aura Finance, Redacted Cartel, Olympus DAO, PowerPool, and many more.

The Balancer DAO’s recent decisions to establish 1 the Balancer Foundation and to form a framework 2 for working with service providers has paved the way for an expanding ecosystem of independent collaborative entities working toward the long-term success of the protocol.

The Balancer protocol has been trusted to secure billions of dollars in assets and to act as an infrastructural layer for key players in the DeFi space. It requires an array of experienced, high-caliber, dedicated contributors who are committed to the success of the protocol in order for it to continue satisfying the needs of Balancer’s users and developer community, and to reach its true potential.

Team Composition & Areas of Work

Orb Collective is led by former Balancer team members who played a major role in driving the growth of the Balancer Protocol to where it is today.

Leadership

Jeremy Musighi, CEO (@immutbl)

Before joining Balancer, between 2010 and 2018, Jeremy co-founded two consumer Web 2.0 companies and founded a crypto investment and consulting firm. In 2020, he joined Balancer Labs as Head of Growth; his responsibilities included: developing a growth strategy for Balancer centered around protocol integrations and partnerships, leading business development and building out a BD team, publicly representing Balancer Labs and advocating for Balancer Protocol via presentations, panels, and interviews, running Wave 2 of the Balancer Grants program and spearheading the formation of the Balancer Grants subDAO (Balancer’s first subDAO), as well as initiating several strategic initiatives within Balancer Labs and the Balancer community.

Aleks Larsen, Board Director (@alekslarsen)

Aleks Larsen is a General Partner at Blockchain Capital. With a multidisciplinary background, Aleks brings a unique combination of experience in systems engineering, fundamental analysis, and capital markets to the firm. Prior to joining Blockchain Capital, Aleks worked as an investment banking analyst at Guggenheim Partners, focusing on mergers & acquisitions and equity financings within the biotechnology sector.

Wei Shi Khai, Board Director (@theshikhai)

Wei Shi Khai is the General Partner & Chief Operations Officer at LongHash Ventures, a Web 3 investment fund and accelerator, where he spearheads early-stage investments for the fund and develops the LongHashX accelerator program, which has raised over $100 million in funding to date. In April 2021, Shi Khai was awarded Forbes 30 Under 30 in recognition of his achievements. He was previously a management consultant at McKinsey, with a focus on digital transformation and analytics across the financial and telecommunications sector in Southeast Asia.

Marketing

Orb’s marketing team consists of 3.5 FTEs and is led by the Director of Marketing, Meghan Gardler (@MeghanGardler).

As Director of Marketing at Orb, Meghan supports the growth and development of the Balancer ecosystem. At Balancer Labs, Meghan oversaw all aspects of the marketing strategy from PR and media, event and conference planning, and product and digital marketing. Meghan has actively been involved in DeFi since 2017 and leverages ten years of implementing comprehensive marketing and communications/PR approaches.

How Orb Marketing will scale global utilization of the Balancer Protocol:

  1. Digital marketing

    • Twitter and social media presence are very important in our space. We will continue establishing a solid presence in the DeFi space by managing and expanding the strong brand identity the Balancer Protocol has today.

  2. Developer marketing

    • Expand the Balancer ecosystem by connecting with projects and individuals who are positioned to build on top of the Balancer protocol and usher in new use cases.

  3. Events

    • We will maintain and nurture brand awareness and the relationship with Balancer community by organizing and ensuring Balancer presence in the main IRL and virtual events, meetups etc.

  4. Communications & PR

    • Assist partners by offering support and guidance with marketing campaigns and launch announcements through blog content and press coverage.

How Orb Marketing will measure its success:

  1. Medium blog visits
  2. Twitter engagement & followers
  3. Youtube views & followers
  4. Participants/submissions to the Hackathons we sponsor
  5. Discord subs
  6. Media mentions & campaigns success
  7. Co-sponsored events & meetups success (new leads & attendees)

Orb Marketing’s past achievements:

  • Balancer Labs Twitter Growth
    • 128K followers (+35% in 1 year)
    • Posts Engagement
      • An average 400K monthly tweet impressions
      • An average 3K monthly Twitter mentions
  • Conference sponsorships and presence
    • ETHDenver 2022
    • Paris BlockChain Week
    • DevConnect 2022
    • Permissionless
  • Creating Balancer’s Video Strategy
    • 25 videos published since 2021 - Average 200 views per video
  • Top Partner and Product Launches:
    • Optimism
      • 25 pieces of coverage, 787k estimated views, 678M potential audience (Coverage book 3)
    • veBAL
    • Aave Boosted Pools
      • 23 pieces of coverage, 960K estimated views, 482M potential audience reach (Coverage book )
    • Balancer-Cow-Protocol

Integrations

Orb’s integrations team consists of 3 FTEs and is led by the Technical Lead, Rabmarut (@rabmarut2).

Rab became involved with the Balancer community in the early days following the launch of V1. He volunteered as a Community Manager in Discord and served a key role in the V1 liquidity mining system before eventually joining Balancer Labs to lead the Integrations Team. Since onboarding 1.5 years ago, Rab has been responsible for supporting external partners in building their applications on top of Balancer. He has written and reviewed smart contracts, built documentation and tooling, and chatted personally with partners to establish the best possible solutions to their problems. Rab and his team have facilitated many key integrations related to LBPs, Boosted Pools, and the upcoming Managed Pools.

Rab has a Master of Science in Engineering and 8 years of experience as a software engineer. Before Balancer, he was a Tech Lead/Staff Engineer in the robotics industry, working primarily on flight control, navigation, and perception systems for UAVs.

How Orb Integrations will scale global utilization of the Balancer Protocol:

  1. Build on Balancer with partners

    • Collaborate with strategic partners to build novel smart contract applications that plug into the Balancer Vault such as Pool Factories, Controllers, and Asset Managers.

  2. Facilitate web3 integrations

    • Aid partners and developers that interface with and source liquidity from the Balancer Vault such as aggregators (CowSwap, 1inch, 0x, Paraswap, etc.) and arbitrageurs.

  3. Provide technical support

    • Assist strategic partners by offering support and guidance on best practices for the Balancer software stack. Respond to technical questions and document answers to new/frequent questions as they arise.

  4. Increase visibility

    • Build and improve integrations that bring increased visibility and daily active users to the Balancer protocol with projects like DeFi portfolio managers (Zerion, Zapper, etc.) and trackers (DeFi Pulse, DeFi Llama, Token Terminal, etc.).

  5. Refine developer experience

    • Offer/improve tooling (balpy, etc.), documentation (conceptual and developer docs), and examples, guides, and tutorials.

How Orb Integrations will measure success:

  1. Independent third-party integrations

    • Growth in the number of smart contracts plugged into the Vault (can monitor new pool factories, for example)

  2. Interactions with Balancer tooling

    • Downloads of published tools and libraries (e.g., balpy)
      • Stars/forks of integration repositories (e.g., balancer-examples)

  3. Developer interest in Balancer

    • Increasing number of inquiries to work with Orb Engineering
    • Improved engagement in Discord dev channels

Orb Integrations’ past achievements:

  • Built a strong integration with CopperLaunch to be the leading provider for Liquidity Bootstrapping Pools (LBPs) as they offer deployments, analytics, and swaps for their pools
  • Created balpy, a set of Balancer I/O scripts built for pool deployers, arbitrageurs, and developers
  • Guided partners through the process of building novel AMMs on top of Balancer, including Sense, Tempus, and HaloDAO
  • Worked with Tribe, Ampleforth, and Overnight to develop custom boosted pool solutions for Fuse, Aave AMPL, and USD+

Partnerships

Orb’s Partnerships team consists of the duo of Alan Stivelman (@AlanStivelman) & Curtis Swick (anon only).

Curtis & Alan have been working for numerous top-tier DAOs anonymously in business development, treasury management, and community management roles since 2020. During their time working for DAOs they have both developed a robust network of connections and garnered a strong Web3 background.

Their roles at Balancer labs included: identifying opportunities for collaboration with new and existing partners, building and nurturing relationships with various ecosystem stakeholders such as builders, large capital holders, and community members, collaborating closely with the Integrations team to move partnerships from idea to technical implementation, identifying emerging industry trends, and executing strategic objectives.

Alan is additionally the founder of Inka Capital, a crypto hedge fund established in 2019, and has 10+ years of experience as a creator in the entertainment industry. Curtis has 10 years of experience working in traditional finance and recruiting as well as starting and operating business in web services and automation. Both Curtis and Alan have been involved in multiple early stage startups both as investors and builders.

How Orb Partnerships will scale global utilization of the Balancer Protocol:

  1. Identify & Build Important Relationships

    • Conduct research, build profiles on potential partners, design opportunity dashboards & monitor metrics.
    • Build relationships with projects and protocols that will drive growth and inspire others in the space to make similar integrations.

  2. Increase Revenue & Volume

    • While retail is still a good portion of volume & TVL today, long term the major driver of volume & TVL will be the protocols that build on top of Balancer. We leverage our strong network to target opportunities that can make a significant impact on Balancer protocol revenue.

  3. Identify and Develop Promising Use Cases for Balancer

    • Research & analysis to identify new potential use cases for Balancer Protocol
    • Work hand in hand with the Orb Integrations team to get partner products and integrations from the initial exploration of ideas to the technical implementation

  4. Help Amplify Understanding of Balancer’s Value Propositions in DeFi

    • Actively engaging with communities across DeFi, explaining the benefits of using Balancer for relevant use cases, and making mutually beneficial proposals to core teams and governance forums

How Orb Partnerships will measure success:

  1. TVL additions from new/existing partnerships
  2. Number of committed partners
  3. Number of additional participants in the veBAL game (bribing or protocol owned veBAL)
  4. Number of overall pitches made to partners

Orb Partnerships’ past achievements

  • 200+ LBPs - hitting volume records with Merit Circle, GuildFi, Gro Finance among others. More than $1.1B raised for the projects and $2.3B in trading volume generated for Balancer Protocol.
  • First metastable pool on Polygon by Shardlabs/Lido.
  • Developing a long term partnership with Index Coop to build their future product lines on Managed Balancer Pools (MBPs).
  • Fostering of and inclusion of TribeDAO (second largest veBAL holders, fifth largest pool on Balancer)
  • Addition of the OHM/DAI/ETH pool on Balancer by working closely with the OlympusDAO team
  • 300+ pitches made to projects inside and adjacent to DeFi

Design

Orb’s Design team consists of Pon Kattera (@pkattera), Director of Design.

Pon is a product designer who specializes in user experience and user interface design. He has 7+ years of experience with crypto/Fintech companies. Previously, he served as the founding designer of the Fintech company Current.com, Design Director at New York agency R/GA, and was a designer at Warby Parker and Steemit.

At Balancer Labs, Pon led the product design (UX & UI) for the Balancer.fi 1 app and Balancer marketing website for over a year. This includes the delivery of designs for the launch of Balancer V2 and new features like Boosted Pools, the CoW Protocol trading UI and veBAL. Pon also built the Balancer marketing website and occasionally contributed to the front-end development of the Balancer.fi 1 web app.

How Orb Design will scale global utilization of the Balancer Protocol:

  1. Improve user experience

    • Balancer is a relatively complex product compared to other AMMs. For example, Balancer pools often have more than two tokens and can have custom weightings. User flows for common actions (e.g. investing, trading and using veBAL) must be tested and iterated upon to make them as simple as possible.

  2. Improve branding

    • To create a world-class brand. A brand that DeFi users (including retail, DAOs and institutions) feel confident and secure to deploy capital. We will develop downloadable assets and guidelines to help partners and people in the ecosystem to present Balancer in the best light possible.

  3. Improve user interfaces

    • Most of our past effort has been on improving the user experience of key user flows within the web app (e.g. improving the investing and trading experiences). Now it’s time to improve the UI across the board. This includes better graphics, animations, and micro-interactions across the site.

  4. Promote other ecosystem applications

    • Shine our spotlight onto ecosystem applications on the marketing website and web app to drive traffic to projects built on Balancer.

  5. Improve dashboard analytics

    • Help liquidity providers and other ecosystem participants to better understand the returns and profitability of their Balancer positions by designing better dashboards and calculators.

How Orb Design will measure success:

  1. Delivering design assets

    • Providing designs for new and improved features ready to be implemented by front-end developers.
    • Including annotated user interfaces and UI assets, along with Github tickets which outline the scope of work for front-end developers.

  2. Improved brand performance

    • Brand performance is relatively hard to measure without extensive research and surveys. Our goal is to build a brand that feels safe, inclusive and flexible.
    • If we achieve this, some general outcomes will include an increase in inbound partnership interest, media coverage, social media engagement and sentiment, and website visits.

Orb Design’s past achievements:

  • Designing the Balancer V2 web app user interfaces
  • Designing and building the Balancer V2 marketing website
  • Designing functional user interfaces for highly technical products like Boosted Pools and pool creation for assets with unknown prices.

People Ops

Orb’s People Ops team consists of Elissa Greenfield, Head of People Ops.

For the last eight years, Elissa has partnered with business leaders in the tech space to design, implement and lead operational processes, with an amazing employee experience always as her northstar. Elissa has helped teams scale from 20-150+ by focusing on the areas that make up the employee lifecycle (recruiting, development, engagement and retention).

Since joining Balance Labs in November, she has launched the company’s first performance management cycle and engagement surveys, streamlined the recruiting process, planned the ecosystem’s very first ONsite (in-person event) and revamped the company’s internal communications strategy.

How Orb People Ops will scale global utilization of the Balancer Protocol:

  1. Internal communications strategy

    • Create and oversee strategies to ensure that the various entities in the Balancer ecosystem are talking to each other in a productive and cohesive way. This includes ecosystem on-sites and meetings, best practices on how to communicate (slack, discord, notion, etc.), and how information is shared.

  2. HR and payroll

    • Manage and own all HR and payroll operations for Orb Collective and the Balancer OpCo. This includes ensuring all contributors are paid and employed compliantly.

  3. Employee lifecycle

    • Create and oversee the strategy around the entire employee lifecycle for Orb Collective and the Balancer OpCo. This includes attraction, recruitment, onboarding, retention, development, and separation.

  4. Contributor listening

    • Run engagement surveys, hold meetings, and create safe spaces to gather feedback on how contributors are feeling, where we are doing well, and where there is room for improvement for the Orb Collective and the Balancer OpCo teams.

How Orb People Ops will measure success:

  1. Track hiring against our headcount plan
  2. Track contributor sentiment through engagement surveys and other channels for contributor listening.
  3. Ensure we are improving in the areas we need to and contributors are happy.

Orb People Ops’ past achievements:

  • Launching Balancer Labs’ first performance review cycle
  • Launching Balancer Labs’ first engagement survey
  • Revamping Balancer Labs’ onboarding process
  • Streamlining and revamping Balancer Labs’ recruiting process
  • Organizing the first Balancer ecosystem onsite

Legal

Our legal team consists of Beth Haddock, Legal Advisor (@HaddockBeth).

Beth Haddock is a legal, regulatory and risk advisor who has helped DeFi and fintech leaders such as Orca, Grayscale, FalconX, MobileCoin and ConsenSys build and grow without taking on unnecessary risk. In addition to her work with Balancer since mid 2021, Beth is a director on a yen-backed stable coin, GYEN, and continues to advocate for sustainable governance in Web3. She will handle governance, risk and legal matters for Orb and its community.

Core Values

Trust

We trust in our ability to solve any challenge and we earn the trust of our teammates by showing up each day with integrity, honesty, and authenticity.

Balance

As the world around us moves in unpredictable ways, we remain centered by maintaining a positive long-term perspective and experiencing the journey one step at a time.

Collaboration

Our decisions are rooted in a team-first mentality, operating in unity and working hand in hand with the Balancer ecosystem to support its success.

Scale

We invest our energy into opportunities that can deliver exponential impact with alignment to our North Star mission to increase global utilization of the Balancer protocol.

Funding Request

Orb is requesting 12 months of funding starting August 1, 2022 and ending July 31, 2023. Since the Balancer DAO intends to pay service providers on a quarterly basis, we have structured our funding request in the following quarterly timeline:

3Q’22: $732,334 USDC [Aug- Sep '22]

4Q’22: $973,413 USDC [Oct- Dec '22]

1Q’23: $1,022,734 USDC [Jan- Mar '23]

2Q’23: $954,471 USDC [Apr- Jun '23]

3Q’23: $305,725 [Jul '23]

To ensure that our interests are aligned with the Balancer DAO and to affirm our commitment to the Balancer ecosystem, Orb will only hold exposure to BAL and stablecoins. Below is a summary of the team’s budget projections for the first 12 months of operations.

In the event that Orb is offboarded as a service provider during this 12 month period, we request a transition buffer of 3 months in which Orb receives its scheduled funding to ensure the completion of open projects and a smooth hand-off of processes and responsibilities. If offboarding occurs when there are less than 3 months remaining in the agreement, Orb would receive its full scheduled funding.

EDIT: Orb is going to be requesting BAL via a governance proposal to continue the grants that were promised by Balancer Labs to full-time team members. This BAL would be provided from the token incentive fund within Balancer Labs and would not cost the DAO any additional BAL.

Protocol:Balancer
Date:June 20, 2022
Author:Tristan345
ABOUTGitHub logo