Aura Finance - Community Newsletter (July 10th 2022)
Welcome
Welcome to the inaugural Aura Finance community newsletter! It is our pleasure to welcome friends, DAOs and interested parties to the Aura Finance community as we continue to expand the best social yield aggregation platform in Decentralized Finance (DeFi). Aura Finance’s official launch on June 9th, and subsequent bootstrapping phase, occurred under a backdrop of the worst possible crypto market conditions. With Bitcoin itself seeing its worst month on record, Aura Finance launched in an environment of considerable macro uncertainty and market capitulation. Despite these considerable headwinds, Aura was able to achieve a successful fair launch and to capture over 25% vote escrowed Balancer (veBAL) market share. This 25% veBAL capture officially represents the largest single position in veBAL and has demonstrated the viability of the protocol after only a month in existence!
For Aura Finance, the work is not yet done. Aura was designed to aggregate the power of the community who believe in Balancer and the potential yields that Balancer pools can provide. To fully realise this mission, Aura will continue to amass Balancer governance tokens to ensure that power truly sits with the community, rather than with crypto whales. Achieving this mission will require Aura to demonstrate to the community, and the undecided Balancer holder, that Aura is the best place to earn sustainable yields.
At the time of writing Aura holds over 26% of all veBAL and is capable of significantly improving yields across a range of Liquidity Pools (LPs). Aura’s 26% control is already feeding into the Aura Finance flywheel and is supported by Redacted Cartel’s Hidden Hand bribe platform with incentives paying for Aura votes. This is especially valuable as a dollar worth of Vote Locked Aura (vlAURA) is currently voting with twice the power of a dollar of veBAL! This market mismatch in voting strength between Aura and Balancer will likely not last for very long, but it once again demonstrates to the crypto community the benefits of an investment in Aura Finance.
Aura’s success in its first month of launch is something we are incredibly proud of, and something we will continue to promote. Our newsletters will be released every fortnight (bi-weekly) with the goal of informing you, the reader, of what has been achieved over the preceding 2 weeks. We will discuss updates to governance, partnerships and plans as well as potential risks and community news. This newsletter also acknowledges that not everyone has the time to scroll through Discord and Twitter on a daily basis. It will be our goal to bring you the highlights from our community of amazing contributors and partners in a concise and easily digestible format. Once again, welcome to Aura Finance, we look forward to sharing our journey with you for years to come.
Community News
Aura is fortunate to have a passionate community of dedicated builders and content creators. If you are a keen twitter ‘threadoor’ then please reach out to the ambassadors in the Discord to have your details recorded for publication in the Aura newsletter. The more we can support community engagement and foster connections between like minded DeFi users the healthier the protocol will be.
To foster this growth, Aura has launched a Diplomat program that is designed to support interested community members in building out Aura related content. Head on over to Discord at https://discord.aura.finance to find out more details.
Check out this massive thread from the SmallCapScientist. The thread explores the road that Aura has taken in becoming what it is today coupled with some excellent updates.
https://twitter.com/SmallCapScience/status/1545941459517353985?s=20&t=pcQW_2hr3NwMbvYnD6bfoQ 2
Also check out Temmy’s tweet here. This tweet explores the partnership with Olympus DAO and is a good read before diving into the forum to really explore what the community is thinking regarding his potential partnership!
https://twitter.com/OlympusDAO/status/1545111297720832000 6
YouTube
YouTube is also a place where a lot of our users go to gain a better understanding of DeFi and their investments. Some Aura community creators on youtube include:
Cryptopropheciesanonymous at https://www.youtube.com/c/CryptoPropheciesAnonymous 4
Trantor (the newsletter guy) at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgUmvBsRISqeDyiC-P0K-2w 2
Aura Latest News
Bootstrapping Pools for Aura are completed
Aura has completed the Liquidity Bootstrapping Pool event (June 9th-14th) and the protocol accumulation event (Balancer accumulation) event (July 2nd). Both of these events were highly successful resulting in the accumulation of over 26% of the available veBAL and treasury ETH accumulation over 1,000 ETH.
The Aura Airdrop
From inception, Aura has been determined to onboard community minded DeFi users to Aura Finance and the Balancer ecosystem. This on boarding commenced with an airdrop that maximised long term protocol alignment and minimised token dumping. The airdrop allowed recipients of the Aura token to directly withdraw to their wallets if they paid a 30% fee, whilst those that locked their tokens on the Aura platform were able to keep their full (100%) allotment of tokens. These fees are now being collected and will be distributed to those who locked their tokens at a later date. In keeping with this ethos, Aura completed an initial bonus drop on the 7th of July to vote locked Aura holders (equivalent to 3.61% of vl tokens held by the user), in addition to the planned disbursement mentioned above.
Eligibility for the airdrop itself was based on rewarding users with certain minimum holdings of Balancer, Convex or Lobster DAO NFTs. The claim period for these DeFi power users to get their Aura tokens will expire on July 14th. The process for claiming the airdrop is unchanged, with users connecting their wallets to the aura.finance app and selecting claim in the top right hand corner. Users will then have the choice to claim and lock to receive 100% or withdraw to wallet and receive 70% of the airdrop allocation.
Partnerships
Aura Finance is pleased to welcome a series of partners that have helped to support not only the successful launch of Aura Finance through their own community of interested participants, but also through concrete action. Aura Finance welcomes:
Redacted Cartel as the team managing the incentives for Aura votes on their Hidden Hand platform.
Gnosis DAO, who converted 100,000 veBAL into Aura BAL and turbocharged protocol accumulation. This was followed at publication time by the deposit of $10 Million Balancer Pool tokens for ETH/stETH.
Badger DAO who harnessed their community and their treasury to accumulate very large Aura holdings.
Aura Finance has also welcomed a number of other friendly protocols who were involved in the launch including feiprotocol, yearnfinance, and OlympusDAO.
Security
Security and trust is important to the Aura ecosystem and the most recent security audit from Halborn security identified no bugs deemed medium, high, or critical risk. The Halborn audit follows two previous successful audits from Code4arena and Peckshield, respectively. In addition, Aura has launched a bug bounty event with ImmuneFi for up to $150K to further support the prevention of hacks and security issues.
Governance
Aura Governance
AIP 1 - Community Management and Growth - APPROVED
This gauge vote allocated 50K Aura to fund community programs and incentives, as well a 6 month runway to Aura ambassadors to drive further engagement and awareness to the Aura ecosystem.
AIP 2 - Proposed partnership with Olympus DAO is currently under discussion on the forum and has not yet moved to snapshot. The proposal includes plans for:
Treasury swap for OHM
Aura joining Olympus’ Flex program
Discussion in the forum currently includes benefits to diversifying the Aura treasury and the benefits in joining the Flex program whilst arguments against are concerned about the lack of clear benefit to Aura, dilution to current holders and concerns about the 14 day average price sale amount for a relatively junior project.
Gauge vote for week of July 7th has commenced - ONGOING
The gauge pool round will end on July 12th with support from Hidden Hand including incentives on the 50/50 Aura/ETH pool, 80/20 FDT/ETH pool and the stable FIAT/DAI/USDC pools with more incentives inbound.
To vote, Aura holders will need to have locked their Aura tokens and delegated to themselves on the Aura app. Once this has been completed, Aura voters can vote via snapshot.
Balancer Governance
The last few weeks have been extremely important for Aura holders and partner protocols with considerable discussion and voting occurring over the inclusion of a number of Balancer Pools. These Balancer votes are very important. The ability to include and then allocate vote weight towards gauge weighted pools is paramount to the viability of Aura. Aura was unsuccessful with its first gauge request, BIP 10, which sought to have an Aura/ ETH 80/20 pool added to the gauge pools. This rejection was a surprise for Aura and rallied the protocol to improve participation and vote capture for future pools. With that said, Aura has seen considerable success in having a number of votes approved.
BIP 7 - This BIP proposed the creation of a liquidity pool for AuraBAL. This pool was especially important for Aura as it enabled the protocol to achieve liquidity for the AuraBAL token and allowed for swaps for the newly minted and locked Balancer tokens locked in Aura. The proposal was for:
-50/50 AuraBAL/ (Bal/ETH 80/20 BPT)
Result: APPROVED
BIP 23 A - This BIP covered a series of Badger initiated pools that requested graviAURA/ETH/Aura.
Result: DEFEATED
BIP 23 B - This BIP covered another gauge from Badger, auraBAL/ETH/graviAURA Gauge.
Result: APPROVED
BIP 25 - Revised the proposal from BIP 10 to better align Aura to the long term health of Balancer. This BIP proposed:
-Aura/ETH 50/50 pool
Result: APPROVED
BIP 270- Proposes a DIGG/wBTC/graviAURA pool from Badger DAO in a 40/40/20 format. This proposal was very close and was approved with only a very small margin. DIGG holders and Badger DAO were in support of the proposal and sought to have it included as a tool for graviAURA experimentation and BTC aligned trading, whilst opponents were concerned about the potential for another CREAM style governance attack that does not provide sufficient fees for the Balancer ecosystem.
Result: APPROVED
Disclaimer
This newsletter is not official correspondence and is written by community members.
that’s amazing work!
But otherwise, loving everything AURA!