Aura Finance - Community Newsletter (July 24th, 2022)
Hello and welcome to the second Aura Finance community newsletter. In our first newsletter we provided a summary that covered our successful fair launch, the ongoing partnerships being developed and most importantly, the early success of Aura in attracting a significant percentage of available veBAL. The good news for Aura Finance keeps coming and the protocol is moving from strength to strength. The last 2 weeks have seen Aura deepen its relationship with Hidden Hand through the successful integration of the first gauge voting round and the recent commencement of the second voting round.
Aura has continued to amass interest from across the market and now has over $250 Million in Total Value Locked (TVL) up from the $100 Million reported in the last newsletter. The total percentage of veBAL controlled by Aura Finance has also increased from 26% to 28% over that period, providing even greater voting power to vote locked Aura holders. Aura Finance will never be content to simply rest on our laurels. We are pushing to capture more Balancer governance by implementing new strategies that incentivise the minting and locking of Balancer tokens through smarter reward allocation. These moves have signalled to the market that Aura Finance remains laser focused on capturing Balancer governance and driving value to the Aura and Balancer eco-systems.
The considerable success we have achieved thus far has been a direct result of the incredible opportunity that Balancer governance provides to DeFi and the foresight and planning that has been implemented by the core contributors. Without these efforts, Aura Finance would certainly not be enjoying such rapid success. The ongoing success of this protocol and the ecosystem will, more broadly, rely on the work of our community. It is the community that will ensure that DAOs and interested investors are aware of this incredible opportunity. It is our community that will spot and address threats to the protocol and most importantly, it is our community that will govern and direct the future of Aura Finance. So, once again to our community, welcome and keep up the good work!
Community News
Some of our biggest contributors over the past 2 weeks have been in the forums as new and exciting proposals are being developed. These forum proposals and ‘temperature checks’ are written and then discussed by the community to inform governance. The past week has seen some excellent posts from 0xSami, 0xLamentations, Small Cap Scientist, Tritium and others. Our top social media contributors for Twitter, YouTube and Sound cloud are as follows:
@beethoven_x (https://twitter.com/beethoven_x/) covers the benefits to the Balancer ecosystem, and by association, the Aura Finance ecosystem, in a detailed thread. The thread covers the fees generated for the DAO from staked and interest-bearing tokens. This is especially important as it helps readers understand the importance of certain pools to the health of the DAO and its long term viability.
@SmallCapScience (https://twitter.com/SmallCapScience/) has dropped a set of threads and updates lately that cover the partnership with Redacted Cartel, the ongoing accumulation of TVL in Aura and some great explanations of what is happening in Balancer and Aura more broadly. Make sure you check out and follow this fine Gentlemen to get the latest and greatest info.
@Only1temmy (https://twitter.com/Only1temmy/) has been keeping us up to date on what has been happening in Aura Finance and continues to provide updates about Aura and DeFi more generally. Always interesting stuff from one of the Aura Ambassadors!
@luloloss (https://twitter.com/luloloss/) has tweeted out some great stuff recently covering a number of different protocols. This latest thread covers vote escrowed tokens and their tokenomics. Keep up the great work! (https://twitter.com/luloloss/status/1551070731760349184)
YouTube
YouTube is where a lot of our community members go to gain a better understanding of DeFi and their investments. Some Aura community creators on youtube include:
Cryptopropheciesanonymous who covers the protocol and provides in depth explanations about DeFi at (https://www.youtube.com/c/CryptoPropheciesAnonymous)
Trantor (https://youtube.com/channel/UCgUmvBsRISqeDyiC-P0K-2w) provides ongoing summaries and updates to the Aura finance protocol including discussions on the Balancer Wars.
Crypto Queen has also recently released a video that covers Aura Finance as a high conviction play (NEW Millionaire Plan! Aura Finance (AURA) Price Prediction! - YouTube)
Sound Cloud
Our first ever rap song has been developed by a community member on Sound Cloud, check it out (https://soundcloud.app.goo.gl/wajt2Tbr6fJDtGL66)
Aura Latest News
Aura reward redirection
Aura has moved to ensure the long-term viability of the protocol and has aligned incentives from emissions to best support Aura BAL pools. This has led to a decrease in emissions to vote locked Aura (vlAURA) but has led to an increase in emissions to auraBAL pools. This is important to continue to incentivize new lockers to mint their veBAL tokens and ensure that Aura continues to amass as much governance power in the Balancer eco-system as possible.
Vote Locked Aura continues to be well supported with rewards as Hidden Hand’s vote purchasing system kicks into high gear. The Aura treasury will be providing incentives for votes to the Aura/ETH 50/50 pool along with ‘incentives’ from other DAOs as they seek to incentivize their own pools. At the time of writing this proposal has been approved with 30k Aura to the ETH/Aura pool and 19k to the auraBAL stable pool.
Aura Airdrop completed
The Aura airdrop event has been successfully completed. The final step in the airdrop remains fixing the tribe DAO allocation (approximately 10.6K Aura) which a small bug prevented them from claiming. Once this final piece is completed the remaining unclaimed Aura will be recycled to further increase protocol viability and reward those who have locked with the protocol.
Aura getting attention
Aura is pleased to announce that defi Llama is now tracking Aura Finance, as is deBANK, Zapperfi and others. With growing awareness and listing on DeFi centred sites, Aura continues to build its reputation and brand recognition. Community members are encouraged to continue to spread the good word about the great stuff Aura is doing and building!
Ecosystem Governance
Aura Governance
Gauge Weight for Week of 21st July 2022. The latest round of gauge votes included significant incentives for pools from Fiat DAO, Aura, Stader, DFX, Matic, FDT and CoW Swap. Lockers have the chance to either vote directly on their favorite pools or they can delegate their votes to Hidden Hand or deposit in Badger DAO’s graviAURA pool. With easy options to manage votes, Aura continues to deliver high yields to Aura lockers who are maximizing their returns in the Balancer ecosystem.
[AIP-3] Increasing AURA Float and Liquidity, while Building DAO Runway. This proposal seeks to increase Aura liquidity on the market by selling aura tokens through a tranche system to other DAOS and interested participants for USDC/stables. The goal is to increase the monetary runway for Aura whilst also providing greater accumulation opportunities for interested DAOs and partners.
Result: Approved
[AIP-4] Boost protocol fee to auraBAL to increase Aura’s veBAL intake. This proposal has been described above in the news section. It is focused on increasing rewards to AuraBAL depositors to gain greater veBAL ownership.
Result: Approved
[AIP-5] Aura Foundation Funding Proposal. This proposal seeks to establish funding for The Foundation which will be a Cayman Islands entity that will be responsible for engaging in legal contracts on behalf of the DAO. The Foundation will also have a subsidiary company for hosting the Aura front-end, developing the Aura blockchain application, and maintaining social media accounts and general operations.
Result: Approved
[AIP-6] Deepening AURA/ETH Liquidity With Hidden Hand Incentives From Treasury. Redacted founder 0xSami has proposed increasing incentives for Aura positions in the market by placing more Aura tokens into the bribe mechanics on Hidden Hand. This will increase the total pool of available Aura tokens on the market and reduce a potential liquidity crunch in the future.
Result: Approved
[AIP-7] TribeDAO airdrop redirection bug fix. Tribe DAO was allocated a percentage of the initial airdrop for its users but a bug in the distribution prevented a portion of their allocation from being delivered. This Proposal seeks to remedy that bug and allocate the Aura from the treasury. (approx. 10.6k tokens).
Result: Approved
Balancer Governance
[BIP-29] Introduce GaugeAdder v2. This proposal seeks to streamline the addition of new Gauges and automate a significant portion of the process.
Result: Approved
[BIP-30] Purge Unused Gauges. This proposal will remove unused gauges from the Balancer voting pool if they meet a couple of key criteria. Namely, they are not receiving any votes and they are not the primary sources of liquidity for the tokens. This vote is essentially a clean up of unused positions that are in many cases legacy pools from before the introduction of the ‘ve’ model. This vote will likely be proposed again within the next 2 weeks.
Result: DEFEATED
[BIP-31] Authorise the Batch Relayer v3. A technical proposal that allows for the upgrade of some aspects of the protocol to enable new bb-a-USD functionality.
Result: Approved
[BIP-32] Funding Proposal for Daoism Systems: PROTOCOL REVENUE SHARING FOR POOL & FACTORY CREATORS. This proposal incentivises creators and developers to work in conjunction with Balancer Labs.
Result: Approved
[BIP-33] Orb Marketing Budget Proposal for the Remainder of Q3. This proposal aims to continue Balancer marketing within the newly funded Orb Collective Service Provider (SP), under a new Operating Framework. The Orb marketing team aims to accelerate the growth and awareness of Balancer Protocol.
Result: Approved
Disclaimer
This newsletter is not official correspondence and is written by community members.
