Welcome back for another Chakra Alignment! Let’s check in on everything that happened within the Aura ecosystem during January.
TLDR:
AURA buybacks started
Record high auraBAL buybacks
Hidden Hand UX upgrade
Gyroscope's GYD & E-CLPs growing
Balancer v3 is taking over
Funds from the treasury have started buying back AURA, as approved in AIP-72. 👀
In the most recent bi-weekly epoch, over $300k in vote incentives were distributed to vlAURA holders. Although total incentives were down, efficiency for protocols was high, with each $1 spent on incentives returning $1.58 in emissions.
The auraBAL compounder continues to buy back auraBAL using protocol fees. In January, a record high of $585,144 was bought back, contributing to a 36-43% vAPY for staked auraBAL.
Hidden Hand released a major UX upgrade, simplifying the process for protocols to deposit incentives and enabling the redirection of unused incentives directly to the pool's gauge. Learn more.
Gyroscope continues its impressive growth, with pools containing their stablecoin, $GYD, consistently offering great yields for LPs.
Additionally, Gyroscope's E-CLPs provide a unique liquidity solution for stablecoin issuers, allowing more customizability than traditional AMMs.
Meanwhile, Balancer v3 has already surpassed $100M in total swap volume, achieving this milestone in less than two months since its launch, among other interesting stats.
Boosted pools expand vlAURA's utility, providing an easy way for protocols to gain deep liquidity in both lending and trading markets. Coinshift's USDC | USDL pool enables LPs to earn yield from trading, lending, T-Bills, BAL & AURA emissions, plus MORPHO and SHIFT rewards, all in a familiar LP position.
Votes have passed to deploy v3 on Base and Arbitrum. The deployment to Base will include a Priority Fee Router, designed to charge a priority fee for MEV taxes and distribute it to LPs. Learn more.
What's next for V3? Balancer Co-founder Fernando Martinelli published a short blog post, prioritizing three key objectives over the next two quarters.
1. Supporting Partners
2. Building on v3
3. Driving v3 Integrations
Read more.
You can also hear Fernando talk about Balancer v3 on the recent episode of the Epicenter Podcast!
With v3 pools now live on Aura, new chains coming soon, and countless innovations unfolding, the future is looking bright.