Summary

This is a proposal for Balancer to fund a governance research and dashboard development executed by Blockful’s team of researchers and engineers specializing in coordination mechanisms. We will analyze Balancer’s token and governance structure, its vulnerabilities to different attacks, its current distribution and concentration of voting power, and build an indexer and a dashboard with the relevant data points for anyone to keep track of the governance decentralization and vulnerability in the long term.

Goals

• Identification of Balancer’s governance relevant data points
• Develop retroactive and real-time indexing of the identified data
• Creation of accessible data visualization

Scope

• Contextual analysis:
  • Blockful’s research team will analyze Balancer’s token and governance structures to identify the core data points for risk assessment.
  • Initial observation points are:
    • governance parameters (quorum, strategies…)
    • subdao mapping (Aura, Jones DAO, Tetu…)
    • token holder distribution
    • delegate distribution
    • voting activity
    • voter collusion
    • maximal estimated attack cost
    • minimum estimated attack profit
    • risk free value(RFV) asset exposure
  • Other points of interest are likely to be found during the initial assessment and will be included in this scope
• Data indexer:
  • Blockful will dedicate its data engineering team to create the indexers necessary to gather, organize, and expose the core data points
  • The setup will use on-chain data, initially organizing a retroactive indexing of transactional, voting, and delegation activity.
  • The indexer will keep track of new updates to those activities for every new block to keep the data updated.
  • The indexer will be made available as open-source software.
• Data Dashboard:
  • Blockful will build an interface to make the core data points easy to understand and navigate.
  • The dashboard will be built and hosted by Blockful, made available through real-time updated graphs and tables, and include color-coded risk factor indicators
  • The dashboard will be made available as open-source software.

Gantt Chart

Detailed Timeline & Workload

Costs

Total hours estimated: 540

Hourly rate: $85/h