Aura Finance - Community Newsletter (September 18th, 2022)
Hello and welcome to the 6th edition of the Aura Finance Community newsletter. With the huge race to accumulate Balancer tokens for some hotly contested governance votes over, things have certainly calmed down a bit in the Aura space. For Aura Finance this is great news as our veBAL capture resumes its upwards journey from around 22% to the current 23.5%. With the rewards for the auraBAL pools still ramping up and plenty of incentives on offer for the stable pool, it seems clear that the best place to park your Balancer tokens is in AuraBAL.
The big news over the past couple weeks has been the merge and it was blissfully devoid of any drama! Despite the âbuy the rumour sell the newsâ outcomes to price action, the end result was both smooth and well executed. For Aura Finance the news is especially interesting as some of the biggest staking pools, such as Lido and Rocket Pool, have very large LPs in Aura Finance. From a stakerâs perspective, this remains very interesting as the pools are not subject to Impermanent Loss and the amount of ETH staked continues to grow.
From the protocol level, new players continue to enter the Balancer and Aura Finance ecosystems. With players such as Olympus DAO, Temple DAO, Badger DAO, Beethoven X, Silo, Vesta and others boosting their Balancer pool positions and diving deep into the ecosystem. Notably many of these protocols are whitelisting Aura tokens to be held on their treasuries to further enable votes and drive emissions to their protocols.
Finally, Aura Finance has recently attracted the services of the Aura Intern https://twitter.com/auraintern who has his finger on the pulse for all things Aura Finance. Feel free to DM any great stuff about Aura Finance that you want to see included in newsletters, tweets or otherwise. As always, keep posting, keep asking questions and keep engaging as a community to build out the amazing stuff that is going on with Aura Finance.
Community News
The community continues to create great content across a number of different mediums! If you would like to see your work included in one of our community newsletters then ensure you tag Aura Finance!
@DeFi_Dad remains focused on providing content that covers off on layer 1 and layer 2 AMM. His latest tweets are looking at Optimism and Velodrome as well as comparisons to the Aura Finance flywheel and value proposition. https://twitter.com/DeFi_Dad/status/1570414352959967232
Hamza Muhammed @Hamziyor is a big fan of rocket pool staked ETH and is especially bullish on staking right now. With Aura Finance capturing plenty of rocket pool liquidity this is a very popular topic amongst twitter followers. https://twitter.com/Hamziyor/status/1568931373884260355
@Subli_Defi. Is also very interested in the Rocket Pool ETH integrations with Aura Finance as an alternative to wstETH. Especially the ability to hold non-IL assets for staking that earn a passive yield. https://twitter.com/Subli_Defi/status/1567837158781685762
@rolipony seems to think that Convex is dead and is just a zombie projectâŚ.we are not fans of trolling other projects but it is clear that Aura Finance was the motivation to post. https://twitter.com/rolipony/status/1567805033315729409
Sam Forman @pgpsam. Has recognised the Aura Finance play to become the primary Liquid Staking Destination for Staked ETH with Rocket Pool integrations. https://twitter.com/pgpsam/status/1567739808948142087
jasperthefriendlyghost.eth @Jasper_ETH has given us our best twitter thread for this round with the deep dive on rocket pool Eth and the rewards that are being distributed on Mainnet and OPT. The thread explains the huge moves rocket pool have been making with incentives and their intent to build out their LP on both Balancer and with Aura in the coming months. Lots of details to dive in to on this thread! https://twitter.com/Jasper_ETH/status/1567701671882498050
CryptoTimesResearcher @CryptoTimesRes1 gave us a detailed thread in Japanese on the Balancer and Aura ecosystems. https://twitter.com/CryptoTimesRes1/status/1567642641285906432
@kmets_ seems to be comparing the best place to receive incentives and emissions in a comparison between Convex and Aura Finance. https://twitter.com/kmets_/status/1567617974411952128
@DFXFinance is writing from the protocol level but is keeping the community up to date on what they are doing to incentivise their liquidity on Aura finance. Keep up the good work! https://twitter.com/DFXFinance/status/1570888288369790977
Everything blockchain 
@EverythingB0x has a number of different yield farming strategies with many of them including options such as stable coin liquidity on Aura finance and using leverage for ETH positions. Although we do not recommend leverage, there are some very interesting insights here. https://twitter.com/EverythingB0x/status/1570767985459220480
@0xChimera is very bullish on the rocket pool LP on Aura and the 14% currently on offer with Aura Finance to incentivise liquidity there. https://twitter.com/0xChimera/status/1570741648757493760
@beethoven_x Our friends at Beethoven X have posted a detailed thread on their planned accumulation of Balancer, Aura and AuraBAL tokens using their treasury. Although this thread refers only to a proposal, the idea remains to build out their position in Aura finance to better incorporate their liquidity options for both Mainnet and OPT⌠https://twitter.com/beethoven_x/status/1570442481552035840
Aiham Jaabari @aiham_eth from the Silo community is very excited and remains bullish on the Balancer and Aura Finance community as they build out their position and incentivise their pools on Aura! https://twitter.com/aiham_eth/status/1570416900001206273
@0xHeronimous is a Temple DAO enthusiast. The tweet is all about Temple DAO and their recent play into the world of Aura Finance. With plenty of rewards on offer they are excited about where things are going https://twitter.com/0xHeronimous/status/1569721411463450625
@Benjamin918_ has tweeted about the addition of the Aura Finance staking position to the QiDAO stable coin MAI strategy. Interesting to read. https://twitter.com/Benjamin918_/status/1569630598498766850
@tapioca_dao have tweeted about their upcoming cross chain lending protocol and their plans for omniAURA. There is plenty to read about with their plans at https://twitter.com/tapioca_dao/status/1569153317875625985
YouTube
YouTube remains the home of longer form content for Aura Finance, especially for news and updates. Some recent Aura community content on YouTube includes:
Market Capping is a new channel that is providing deep dives on all things DeFI. Most importantly, the biggest play for many of these aspects of the video is Aura Finance. This video is highly recommended for community members to check out! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzD7JDmdu4E
Crypto Hustler has done an overview of the Aura ecosystem with a token description for beginners. It is a short video and is very accessible for newbies to the space. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OsV07Ppaxas
Hashoshi has done a detailed video on the Ethereum merge and where things are likely to go. The need to stake ETH for POS is the key message with defi and LP focused options being the most important aspects of this analysis with options to stake on Aura included! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6zHjouUVP0
Rocket Fuel has done a detailed video on the rocket Pool and the ETH staking story. Notably, the clearest expression of where to best stake your rocket ETH is on Aura Finance!!! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jia-8jdfJaw
Aura Latest News
New Entrants to the Aura and Balancer ecosystems
There have been a lot of new entrants to both the Balancer ecosystem and the Aura layer over the past 2 weeks. This has included:
Qi DAO
Rocket Pool
Silo Finance
Prime DAO
Olympus DAO (OHM)
Manifold Finance.
Aura Delegate Thread
Did you know that you can vote on Balancer governance proposals with your Aura position? There are plenty of Balancer governance proposals released each week that cover off on things such as gauge weights, governance frameworks, grants etc, that are all covered through snapshot votes using veBAL. (Please note that veBAL voting for incentives is separate and your Aura position is not able to vote on these). To best support the ecosystem, have you considered delegating your votes to the Aura Finance delegation? This will ensure that your votes are always counted towards what is in the best interests of Aura finance moving forward! For instruction on how to delegate visit: https://youtu.be/LUI5oCHlFAE
To ensure the best possible transparency on how these votes are counted, Aura has commenced reporting their deliberations and votes using the Aura delegation thread on the Balancer forum. If you would like to check out the thread to see how the Aura delegates have voted then check out: https://forum.balancer.fi/t/aura-delegate-thread/3729/2
A Milk Road Story
The lads at Milk Road, Ben Levy & Diego Salinas, recently did a story about where some of the top defi wallets in crypto were parking their positions. Of the 8 largest wallets, each with tens of millions of Dollars in crypto, the most commonly used places to earn yield were in Convex and Aura Finance. To be sure, Whales do not always get it right, but we think they certainly got it right on this one. Aura continues to be the best place to park many stable coins and appears to be a growing very quickly as the preferred location in defi for staking ETH.
APY.Vision partnership
APY.vision, a leader in historical user data in DeFi, is putting the finishing touches on full user historical profit and loss data for many Aura related positions. Itâs live now and ready to test. They are rolling out support for auraBAL positions and the related rewards, all BPT positions staked on Aura (with related Aura rewards), and locked Aura positions. They said our user friendly CLAIM ALL button will give them nightmares for a bit, but they are looking forward to all our angels trying things out. APY.vision will have some reps monitoring a new #apy-vision channel in discord. If you see any issues with your positions on their site please let them know in that channel and they will use those reports to make corrections
Eco-system Governance
To get the latest on Aura governance updates head over to the Aura Discord and track the channel âGovernance updatesâ. Be on the look out for the âOfficial Newsletterâ coming soon!
Disclaimer
This newsletter is not official Aura correspondence and is written by community members.