<aside> 🪟 This framework provides general guidance for the creation of Balancer Friendly Forks, collaborative forks of the Balancer Protocol on alternative blockchains that BalancerDAO is not actively participating in.
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The concept of Balancer Friendly Fork was introduced by the Beethoven in October 2021. The Friendly Fork models allows third-party teams to deploy the Balancer Protocol on additional ecosystem chains that the current BalancerDAO is unable to focus on. The intent is to have a shared relationship in terms of development and resources between BalancerDAO and the Balancer Friendly Forks.
The first Friendly Fork with Beethoven X (a friendly fork on Fantom) has been well-received by both communities. After the acceptance of the Friendly Fork proposal by the Beethoven X and BalancerDAO, 4% of the of the BEETS token where transferred to the Balancer Treasury and 1% of the total BEETS tokens where airdropped to BAL holders and poolers who completed certain steps.
Although the first Friendly Fork has been an immense success, it turned out to be harder to launch additional Friendly Forks due the the complexity associated with the creation and maintenance of a Friendly Fork. The Beethoven X team has spoiled us by being an incredibly committed group, however we can’t expect the same level of commitment from future groups - as they may need support of buy-in to pull off the creation of a successful friendly fork.
It is important for BalancerDAO to be able to curate and support potential Friendly Forks in an attempt to improve and expand the Balancer Ecosystem. This means understanding what we are able to offer as support and what we expect in return for it. Also, the current Friendly Fork model is rather one-side (expecting tokens from a Friendly Fork) and potentially underestimates the additional value Friendly Forks can bring the BalancerDAO governance and utilization, therefore we try to explore potential co-incentivized frameworks that ultimately lead to the Balancer Protocol becoming the most used infrastructure for decentralized liquidity, through BalancerDAO and it’s partners.
Contribute to Balancer Protocol’s north star goal of becoming the most used technology for Decentralised Liquidity.
The first step in a potential Friendly Fork is the sourcing and curation of potential Friendly Forks. All Active and Potential Friendly Forks are added to the page with basic information of the project.
The basic information includes details about the Chain that the Friendly Fork aims to deploy on and contact information and details about the team and project.
A technical checklist will be formalized based on requirements set by the DAO.
Some suggestions from the community
Verified contracts - Vault, Authorizer, BalancerHelpers, WeightedPoolFactory, WeightedPool2TokensFactory, StablePhantomPoolFactory] Subgraph SOR UI - (minimally swap, join, exit; more functionality preferred)
Once the basic details have been established - the Curation process is kickstarted by the Partnership subDAO where the overall relevancy and quality of the friendly fork are estimated based on internal research.
The research is divided into two section: - Chain: This section evaluates the perceived value and resources of the proposed Chain. This allows us to understand how big the opportunity is to deploy on this chain. - Team: This section evaluates the quality of the proposed project team and the likelihood for them to launch a successful friendly fork.
The outcome of this research will be added to the and guide the next steps of the Friendly Fork Process.
After having estimated the potential of the project, the next steps is engage in a Partnership evaluation exercise to determine which BalancerDAO resources would be beneficial to the Friendly Fork Project.
Below we have illustrated the potential contributions the BalancerDAO & Balancer Ecosystem can provide to Friendly Fork projects. Of course, commitments need to be made by respective Balancer Ecosystem groups before an agreement can be made.