[Grant Proposal] Enzyme Integration by Avantgarde Finance

Grants
1

Name: @ignaciorsg.eth

Organization: Avantgarde Finance

Detailed Description of Grant Request

Avantgarde is proposing to integrate Aura with Enzyme at the protocol level and to build the corresponding front-end. This will enable Enzyme vault managers that interact with Balancer pools to maximise their yield via Aura.

About Enzyme

Enzyme (app.enzyme.finance) is a protocol built on Ethereum that allows users to create, manage and invest in custom crypto asset management vaults. Our goal is to decentralize traditional asset management and lower barriers to entry, thereby opening access to more global consumers. As of 28 October 2022, Enzyme’s AUM sits around $73m.

Enzyme integrates with the wider world of DeFi through adapter contracts that are reviewed and deployed by a technical council DAO. Currently, there are 17 such integrations that allow a vault’s manager to interact with third-party protocols on the vault’s behalf (with more on the way!).

The world of DeFi is still relatively new, with estimates that only ~4M people have ever used DeFi protocols. However, there are somewhere between 200M to 300M potential users worldwide by most estimates, which would put DeFi penetration below 2% at the moment.

This means that the space has plenty of exciting room for growth! Enzyme intends to fill this gap by functioning as a DeFi operating system, enabling anyone to build and scale an investment strategy that suits their needs. Integrating Aura is one step we would like to take to achieve this goal.

Enzyme has been live on Mainnet since winter 2019. The protocol has been extensively audited(audit.enzyme.finance) by top tier firms and has an active $400k bug bounty in immunefi. Avantgarde has developed and maintained good working relationships with security professionals throughout the industry.

About Avantgarde

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[Avantgarde Finance] (https://avantgarde.bio.link/) is and will continue to be a primary contributor to the Enzyme ecosystem. We are a team of technologists and financial professionals with a history of shipping high quality code.

Over the past 3 years, the team has:

  • deployed two new versions of the protocol
  • increased the protocol’s integrations from ~5 to ~20
  • built and managed extensive monitoring and data collection infrastructure including seven separate subgraphs
  • maintained a user-friendly dApp
  • performed ad hoc contract work for large protocol users

How will your project benefit the Aura Ecosystem?

Today, $76m TVL is managed in the Enzyme ecosystem (Ethereum and Polygon).

By granting this proposal we will be expanding the reach of the Aura protocol to a new set of users, by enabling access to DAO treasuries & fund managers to maximize yield potential and governance power through BPTs.

How much are you requesting for the grant?

Compensation

We are requesting $25,000 denominated in AURA (calculated using a 7-day historical moving average at the time of the proposal’s execution) from the Aura Ecosystem Fund to our governance participation address (gov.avantgardefi.eth). The AURA will be locked and used for voting.

Work Breakdown
The work will be divided in 3 phases:

Development Days Resources
Phase 1 Protocol Research 3 1 Developer
Protocol Development 7 1 Developer
Phase 2 Audit Time (ChainSecurity) 5 1 Auditor
Phase 3 Frontend Research 3 1 Developer
UX Research & Designs 3 1 Designer
Frontend Development 7 1 Developer
Total Development Days 28 4

Not in Scope

The Balancer adapter has been developed and audited separately, it is currently in phase 3, and it is not in the scope of this proposal.

Summary

Total Development Days 28
ETA December / Jan 2023
Budget USD 25’000
Running Costs N/A
2

Your request is well received. The AEF Committee will review shortly.

1 Like
3

Thanks!

We are open to answer any questions.

1 Like
4

Hello. This is an interesting proposal. I’ve poked around enzyme a few times but never succeeded in using it for anything that I was trying to do. The ability to easily manage a set of balancer/aura investments would have changed that.

I would find this proposal a lot more compelling if it included some mockups of what the UI elements would look like and/or a bit more of clarity around the following things:

What is the user story of this integration? Beyond investing BPTs in aura, do you plan to add functionality to allow DAOs to somehow reinvest the BAL and AURA yields earned? Can you provide one example of a new usage pattern(vault I suppose) this integration would enable? Who might want to use such a pattern?

5

Hello @Tritium

Thanks for your comment. I’ve highlighted your questions and our responses below.

Q1. What is the user story of this integration?

Our vision for the journey is to allow vault managers to stake their Balancer Pool Tokens to accrue additional rewards. Our adapter will be interacting with the ERC-20 wrappers for Aura from which vault managers will have the following actions:

• stake(): Stake a Balancer v2 LP token into the Aura pool.

• unstake(): Unstake a Balancer v2 LP token from the Aura pool.

• claimRewards(): Claim rewards for a given staking token.

Q2. Beyond investing BPTs in Aura, do you plan to add functionality to allow DAOs to somehow reinvest the BAL and AURA yields earned?

Over the last quarter, we have spent a considerable amount of resources enabling vault managers to interact with Balancer directly; we will soon release a Balancer adapter which will allow users to provide liquidity to Balancer Weighted and Stable pools.

Building an Aura integration to stake BLP tokens is an obvious next step to empower vault managers who opt to use the new Balancer functionality and why we proposed this grant. Given a willingness to help fund this first step, we would be interested in brainstorming incremental future functionality that would allow for users to put the AURA they earn to work.

Q3. Can you provide one example of a new usage pattern(vault I suppose) this integration would enable? Who might want to use such a pattern?

Currently there is $28m worth of stETH held in Enzyme vaults. For a good portion of this year, the single largest position on the platform was the Unslashed vault providing liquidity to Lido’s Curve pool. It is not a huge leap to imagine, given the recent increase in TVL of the Balancer stETH pool, that users will be interested in providing liquidity there and staking the resulting BLP tokens on Aura.

Glad to hear that you’ve played around with Enzyme. Out of curiosity, what were you trying to do that it couldn’t? We’ve released a lot of new functionality this year. If you’re interested, I’d love to propose a demo of the platform where we walk through some of the things you can do. It would be a great opportunity for us to gather feedback from you, and show you how we see this integration happening.

6

It seems to me like Enzyme is a well funded project (far better funded than AURA) and the proposed integration promote/encourage DAO’s like unslashed to farm and dump BAL and AURA. While this is fine/expected, I wonder why you think Aura should pay the already well funded Aventgarde team to build this integration?

7

We are Avantgarde Finance, not enzyme. Avantgarde Finance is a core contributor to the Enzyme Protocol.

Enzyme is just one of our many clients, and starting on October 1st 2022 the Avantgarde funding only covers core development and maintenance of the core Enzyme protocol and not 3rd party integrations.

We would like to accumulate tokens in other promising projects if we are going to develop code which we both benefit from at our own expense. We have a dedicated governance team and we want to become more and more involved in DeFi governance as we integrate more projects.

1 Like
8

Hi, this grant request has been taken to the Grant committee for review and voting. If you would like to make any final amendments to the proposal to further clarify any of the questions raised, then please do so in the next 24 hours

1 Like
9

Thank you for your grant submission. The Committee has completed the discussion and review process over the last 7 days. In this instance, the Committee has decided to not approve your grant request. If you would like further details as to the decision making process please feel free to reach out to the committee via the forum. Once again, thank you for your proposal and for your ongoing support of Aura Finance.