Should GnosisDAO support a Balancer Friendly Fork on Gnosis Chain?
Should GnosisDAO work towards bringing Balancer to Gnosis Chain?
0voters
Symmetric, a fork of Balancer, posted a proposal on the Balancer forum to become a friendly fork which could potentially mean that Balancer cannot come to the Gnosis Chain in the short term.
Background
GnosisDAO treasury has contributed liquidity to Balancer protocol and it has accumulated (1MM BAL), hodled and market made BAL for a long time.
From the CowSwap point of view, having Balancer on Gnosis Chain would be more valuable than a fork. Specifically, (as highlighted in the blog post you linked), we have “tight” integration with the Balancer Vault contract that would not be possible with a friendly fork. The reason being that we rely on there being a Balancer V2 Vault at the deterministic address 0xba12222222228d8ba445958a75a0704d566bf2c8 which would not be possible with a fork.
I can’t think of a clear difference between having a FF vs. official Balancer on Gnosis chain, but then I also thought that Cowswaps integration with Balancer could make a big difference, and this could also help align all three even more.
One seeming advantage of a friendly fork could be that it might be more free to experiment, but reading through the Symmetric friendly fork proposal I saw that many are concerned about endorsing a friendly fork if it strays too far from official Balancer. Likewise if Gnosis Chain aims to be a canary chain it could still offer a place for experimentation, but it would be by Balancer themselves, for example interacting with the beacon chain.
Although the FF proposal from symmetric was rejected I still would prefer to see an integration with them, already settled on gnosis chain for quite a while. But ofc only if teams are compatible, don’t have insight in this. Imho the rejection of the proposal was due to some misunderstanding and there might the a possibility to issue a new one soon.
Sure! The underlying GPv2Settlement contract used by CowSwap for executing batched auctions on-chain was deployed with a Vault contract configured immutably to be 0xba12222222228d8ba445958a75a0704d566bf2c8. The assumption was that since Balancer V2 uses deterministic deployments, it will only ever be deployed on that address for EVM-compatible networks it deploys on.
That being said CowSwap would be integrate with Symmetric as on-chain liquidity, but not to take advantage of any of the “tight integration” features from Balancer V2 (i.e. being able to use Balancer V2 internal balances, reuse approvals to the Vault contract and a “fast-swap” path that is more gas efficient).
Thanks for explaining! Could Symmetric deploy at 0xba12222222228d8ba445958a75a0704d566bf2c8 or partner with Balancer to make them deploy that contract for them to use? Or can cowswap upgrade the contract to add another vault?
Just thinking aloud here. With cooperation a lot could be possible…
I agree with this, as Symmetric has already built up a community on Gnosis. You are right, after reading the response from Symmetric there seems a lot of confusion due to which it failed. Although it is a small team the kind of work they are doing is great so far as compared to any other similar size teams.
I have been apart of the Gnosis/xDai community for a while, and am an especially big fan of Symmetric.
Personally, I wholeheartedly believe Symmetric should be the Balancer Friendly fork we back. Their team has done a lot for this community, they are very vocal, and very loyal to Gnosis. I see no reason to create a competitor rather than simply help them succeed.
They are extremely competitive and punch above their weight class. I would much rather we work with them. Personally, a fork straying from Balancer isn’t the biggest concern to me. As long as they do their due diligence and we help support them via audits, the ability to customize should be a benefit, not a burden.
Not to mention, I personally don’t see why either the address we integrate with can’t change or be resolved in another manner. Obviously I would need to learn more about that to give a full opinion, but that feels like a small enough hurdle that there are numerous ways we can overcome it.
As everyone knows there is a Balancer fork (v2 just released btw) that GnosisDAO already supports with GNO liquidity rewards called Symmetric…
SymmetricDAO is already putting together a revised proposal to be an approved Balancer BFF on GC as well as Celo . As to integrations with CowSwap I have no doubt there could be co-ordination of efforts to achieve the same results with Symmetric on GC.
I don’t know the state of the Balancer team but Symmetric has already done the hard work forking and building liquidity on GC with Balancer V1 - which btw GnosisDAO may already? be using by to earn SYMM return with deposits in the GNO:ETH and possibly GNO:xDAI Symmetric pools. (we saw some large deposits of GNO into the Symmetric pools recently)
As an investor in Symmetric and in Gnosis I would prefer that GC stick with the team that started with Balancer v1/Symmetric launched almost a year ago and (soon if not now v2) fork on both networks. The product is here/now. I and a number of others would be disappointed to see another Balancer Fork come to GC. Symmetric is also already on Celo - so should Cowswap integrate with Symmetric here - Celo should be an easy integration as well.
Symmetric has also partnered with PrimeDAO to bring DAO launch liquidity to Celo and eventually come to GC.
In theory yes, but then they would be deploying a Balancer V2 vault with the exact same parameters as the Mainnet. If I’m not mistaken, this includes being limited to using the same Authorizer contract from the constructor arguments here that was deployed with a BalancerDAO-controlled Safe as the admin from the constructor arguments here.
To me, this means that either the friendly fork would be OK with being subject to Balancer governance, or Balancer would be OK with giving up “ownership” of the Vault contract on GChain - meaning they would not be able to deploy there in the future to the same address if they changed their minds.
While it is possible to integrate liquidity from Symmetric (and depending on how much liquidity is on there may be a good idea for CowSwap regardless of the resolution of this proposal) - I don’t think its possible to replace the Balancer V2 Vault on GChain with a forked version using the current CowSwap contracts (because the GPv2Settlement contract requires the Vault to be at address 0xba12222222228d8ba445958a75a0704d566bf2c8).
