Aura Finance: Chakra Alignment (March 14, 2023)

GM Meditators - a lot of updates for today's 5^th Chakra Alignment!

We are covering auraBAL's recent growth, the upcoming Balancer & Aura’s cross-chain era, Olympus' continued Aura accumulation, and exciting partnerships with Synapse Protocol and Redacted Cartel's Hidden Hand.

So while the Shanghai upgrade is drawing closer and Aura continues in its LSD narrative, Aura is notably working hard on its auraBAL compounder and preparing itself for Balancer's push towards major blockchains.

Let's get those chakras aligned!

News

Key Stats: (comparing the changes since the last newsletter)

• Total Value Locked $0.65B  -   (Increase of $40M)
• Percentage of veBAL controlled: 27.22%  -  (increase of 1.1%)
• Total vote locked Aura: 13.8M  - (Increase of approximately 200K)

Top 3 Incentives Providers for Vote Locked AURA:

• 🥇 50/50 AURA/WETH
• 🥈 Olympus' 50/50 OHM/WETH
• 🥉Rocket Pool’s MetaStable rETH/WETH

The auraBAL Wrapper And Its Recent Growth

In the early days of Aura, it was practical for Meditators to stake veBAL with Aura to receive auraBAL, as well as LPs who can deposit liquidity and receive Aura LP tokens. Compared to staking alone, auraBAL stakers could now accumulate more rewards than holding veBAL, while LPs enjoy boosted emissions.

With the growth and popularity of Aura, other protocols started to notice its influencer in the Balancer ecosystem and would send incentives to vlAURA holders to impact governance.

Because of this, the rewards auraBAL stakers received became more valuable.

auraBAL not only helps Meditators gain exposure to the Balancer ecosystem, it also provides boosted rewards, helps LPs maintain liquidity, all while using the staked veBAL for more partnerships into the Balancer ecosystem.

So when the auraBAL Wrapper Creation proposal (AIP-21) recently passed voting, there has unsurprisingly been a significant number of auraBAL mints occurring since then.

One Meditator had apparently minted over 33k auraBAL in one transaction, and Aura Finance has since reported that more than 100K auraBAL has been minted since February.

Hopeful that there will be continued growth on this front as Meditators are expectantly waiting for the auraBAL compounder wrapper to go live!

Balancer And Aura's Cross-Chain Era

This announcement particularly stems from Balancer's announcement in supporting Coinbase's newly created L2 scaling solution, Build On Base.

With such announcement, Balancer plans on providing gauge support on Arbitrum, Avalanche, Optimism and zkSync in the pipeline. It will only be a mater of time before other protocols and LPs take notice.

But what does that mean for Aura? It means more cost-effective methods for LSD partners to utilize Aura to amplify their presence cross-chain.

But don't take our word for it, Aura Finance explains this well in their recent Balancer deep dive thread

OHM's 100K Voting Incentives... More To Come?

Notably, in the Gauge Weight for Week of 2nd March 2023, Olympus swoops in before the voting cycle closes and provides a 100K voting incentive for vlAURA holders.

Meditators are hopeful for more vlAURA voting incentives, as one Meditator recently found on the OlympusDAO forums that "The treasury team plans to have an OIP up in short order on Aura strategy beyond the $1M approved to date."

Interesting.

Synapse and Redacted Cartel Partnership

Synapse Protocol, with the help of Redacted Cartel, plans to launch of a new SYN/ETH pool on Aura Finance that will improve capital efficiency around the SYN/ETH pair.

By migrating liquidity to Balancer & migrating incentives to Hidden Hand vs. direct emissions, Synapse DAO can deepen liquidity further.

The first phase will reallocate 15,000 SYN a week, or a quarter of the existing incentives, to vlAURA Hidden Hand incentives, for one gauge voting cycle (two weeks).

The second phase will reallocate 25,000 SYN a week, or 45% of the voting incentives, to vlAURA Hidden Hand incentives, the next voting cycle. On the final phase, Synapse DAO will allocate 35,000 SYN a week to vlAURA voting incentives.

This will then end the Sushiswap migration and Sushi incentives. Read more about its proposal here.

Twitter

Aside from the updates above, a lot of tweets covered in this section are been focused on Aura's ongoing partnerships and developments.

Our top Tweet of the week comes from @TechFlowPost which translated Aura Finance's LSD Narrative thread into Chinese, resulting in hundreds of retweets and likes, positioning Aura Finance as a strong "winner" in the LSD Shanghai update.

Interestingly, Aura would then create two new language-focused Twitter channels, one for Chinese Meditators (@AuraFinanceCN) and another for Korean Meditators (@AuraFinanceKR)

Hope to see more global Meditators as Aura expands its global reach!

As for StaFi Protocol, we're pleased to see its Balancer and Aura pools doing well.

Meanwhile, BiLira tweets in Turkish, promoting their Balancer TRYB/USDC pool.

Gearbox Protocol teases CT with its v3, hinting at Balancer and Aura integrations (but not dropping too much alpha yet...)

Karpatkey, a DAO treasury manager run by some Aura-aligned partners, recently began managing the ENS Endowment. This includes some deployment of ETH to Aura strategies.

However @Wartull plans on accomplishing this, both Meditators and OHMies can't wait for the results!

@sagattya, tweeting in Japanese, feels bullish about the 106%APR they're receiving from Balancer's USDR/USDC pool, as well as the other stablecoin yield.

Last but not least, we're including @SmallCapScientist in our list of tweets, because we're all wishing for another new AURA ATH each day.

YouTube

Aura is truly going global with two new videos in Chinese and Polish respectively.

A video in Chinese asks the important question: Will Aura Finance be the biggest winner of the Shanghai Upgrade?

Meanwhile, another important question asked in the Polish video: Will Aura Finance make 1000%?

Only time will tell...

Dune Dashboards and Analytics

Growth of Aura Token Holders

While it is optimistic to want growth in every protocol, Meditators will be pleased to know that Aura has grown quite rapidly in the last month, reaching to around 4K in Aura token holders early March.

We can only hope that number would keep on scaling, especially during its cross-chain era.

Aura DEX Trades

As for its existing DEX trades, Aura has notably been trading mostly on Balancer and Uniswap, with 1inch gaining some volume in the last few months of 2023.

Eco-system Governance

To get the latest on Aura governance updates head over to the Aura Discord and be sure to follow Aura Finance on twitter.

Disclaimer

The Chakra Alignment series is not official Aura correspondence and is written by community members.