Greetings all, we’ve been looking to create a new Balancer pool for some time now (See #735, #742, and #727), but it’s become apparent that it is cost prohibitive to do this on the main Ethereum chain. As such we are looking at two options for moving off chain:
Polygon, the sidechain formerly known as Matic.
Arbitrum, the optomistic L2 from Offchain labs.
These options were selected primarily because of the availability of our needed tools there. Both options have support for:
Gnosis Safe (our multisig)
Balancer which we use for our Seed pool
RAI, a stable coin we align with to provide Seed stability
Zodiac Tools, the DAO tools we plan to use in the future
As far as I’m aware, these are the only non-main chain options that support all of these tools. Once we decide which chain we want to work on, we will make a new Gnosis Safe there(controlled by our main-chain one) and create our new V2 Balancer pool there. We are also formulating a plan to distribute Seeds there, by minting them on main-chain, then bridging them over and distriubting them on the chosen chain. We also have long term plans to set-up our DAO governance on the chosen chain with Zodiac Tools. (One reason we like this is it will allow us to make our Discord votes actionable on-chain)
The primary differences between the two options; Polygon and Arbitrum are cost and Ethos.
Polygon has nearly zero gas fees (fractions of a penny per transaction), but it is it’s own chain. It’s a chain run by “trusted validators” that is EVM compatible but not actually part of Ethereum or it’s Ethos.
Arbitrum still has gas fees, around $5 for a transfer and $7-10 for a token swap, but it is designed to be a “Layer 2” that just sits atop main-chain and bundles transactions for easier and faster execution. As such it is dependent on Ethereum and more inline with it’s Ethos.
Feel free to discuss here or on Discord, and make sure you vote on Discord!
This is a predicament. Although I love what Arbitrum has released I am having trouble with the fees but wow, transactions are much faster. I find my self constantly trying to use Polygon every chance I get, but their security assurances may pose too much risk if we get a lot of value locked in there.
I have to lean towards Polygon at this point because of the urgency as well as it seems to solve a pressing problem, and Polygon is gaining a lot of traction. I think Celsius had made a Polygon collaboration announcement today and the have a lot of exposure, so that makes me feel better and more confident
I support Polygon for cost and speed of tx’s, plus existing products with gnosis/daohaus should streamline things once we arrive there and settle in.
To me, there isn’t really an predicament. Arbitrum costs are ~100x that of polygon. They’re really only cheap in comparison to fees on mainnet, and if we switch back to airdropping seeds instead of continuing with the merkle root, those fees are going to be a problem.
I don’t think there’s a strong argument to be made that polygon’s lesser security equates to any lack of security. The polygon network - as I know you’re aware - handles billions in transaction volumes daily, and has yet to suffer a known attack on the network itself. It’s not a logical argument I’d usually resort to, but in this case, maybe I’ll use the ol’ appeal to authority and say 'it’s good enough for ___, why not us?" Where blank can be your pick of Aave, Balancer, Sushiswap and tons of other projects who have a much larger treasury than us and aren’t concerned about this.
@Bacon, I have a couple of questions about some of the "we"s in your posts. Specifically the 2nd we of the 1st paragraph and the 4th and 5th we in the 5th paragraph. Who are the members of this task force? I’ve begun and been privy to casual conversations about the subject of migrating to polygon since March or so and I’ve seen pretty solid opposition. Mainly for reasons that I think are somewhere between terrible and ignorant, but there is one thing: the funds in the balancer pool belong to us individually and MetaGame doesn’t have any custody or authority over them. Anyone migrating to a new pool will need to pay the gas to remove their liquidity from the mainnet pool and then to bridge to Polygon.
IMO, if our choices are between Polygon and Arbitrum, that’s no choice at all. But why are these the only options?
For Balancer? If so then again, why? For 4% feees? For 70/30? Or for Rai? Cos is there really Rai on Polygon? I found a few fake ones, but that’s it.
We had a vote to add RAI to the pool, and it ended up necessitating a new pool. Now I’ve raised a vote for a new chain, I suppose I should have left a main chain option in the poll, but no one has asked for one. So that’s what I mean by “we”, the democratic body of MetaGame.
I explain this in the original post, but to be clear: These are our best choices for compatibility across all the tools. Mostly Gnosis/Zodiac is the limiting factor here. I’ve confirmed RAI is on Polygon. The liquidity there is a little low, but I’m trying to figure out how to increase that.
I’m generally inclined to agree with you here. Largely in agreement with your Pros. I’m pretty sure you do have to bridge Eth over there though.
On the Con ends of things, I wouldn’t but any faith/hope in the Balancer gasless swaps. I don’t know how they work and odds aren’t great that they will work for our pool. Balancer has a history of over promising and under delivering.
This is a pretty bold claim! Do you sources/references to back this up? (I’m mostly just curious)
Also, like it or not, the vote is overwhelmingly in favor of Polygon. . So it seems we’ll be there for now. Hopefully once we get some of these financials ironed out we can grow to the point where we’re on several chains. It’s also worth nothing that, for better or worse, we’ll likely still have the pool on mainchain. We have several inactive Patrons that I don’t expect will move their liquidity, so unless someone liquidates them we’ll still have our current pool.
Misanth just tested it on our pool a few days ago, said it actually does work.
Yeah, there was a thread about people conflating L2s & sidechains on twitter with Mihajlo (one of the founders) & idk who else where he was claiming that its the same & that Polygon also inherits the security of mainnet as other L2s, and the other guy was basically just like “no dude that’s literally not how it works”. Was pretty cringe but couldn’t tell if he was trying to cover up false adverting of Polygon as a L2 or is legit that clueless about his own product.
I’d try to dig it up if we were considering to redo the vote but this way it just doesn’t seem worth the effort
Not that overwhelming with 18 for Polygon & 11 for Arbitrum and I think a lot more people would vote for Arbitrum if they considered everything in this thread.
I really don’t like Polygon & kind of annoying it won, but I also just want us to get on with it, so… Fuck it?
I think its good we’ll still have the mainnet pool, just not sure how we’ll reconcile pSeeds & PpSeeds
Also would be good to look into deploying an arbitrage bot, so its at least MG that benefits from arbitrage between the mainnet & polygon pools.
Lol basically. I mean while I agree with you here, there is a silver lining to this. I feel like people in the crypto space tend to get a little. . . culty. . . about decentralization, so it’s kinda reassuring to see people vote for utility over ideation. Even though I don’t really agree with it this time. It should also be a lot easier to make the pool on Polygon; with gas being almost free it’ll make my inevitable fuck-ups less costly.
It actually sounds to me (based just on your description) like that person may have been themselves conflating matic with polygon, which would be incorrect. The Matic network was acquired by Polygon as part of their so-called “Internet of Blockchains” and they now refer to it as “Polygon PoS,” as it’s a proof of stake chain. They also operate a plasma network and have stated that they intend to release zk rollup as well as optimistic rollup products.
I don’t know anything at all about the politics of Polygon, but they seem pretty smart to me. I was talking to Austin Griffith a few months ago about sidechains and I asked him who he thought would win between polygon and xdai. He told me unequivocally that he thought polygon would win because of how much money and technical support they gave to developers in their ecosystem. I’m paraphrasing here, but my takeaway was that he felt pretty good about how they run things. Interestingly he made an investment in both matic and xdai stake a few hours later - maybe I incepted him.
I think beyond Austin, if we thought about it, we probably know a fair number of people within and without metagame who can share their experience with Polygon as developers, investors, gamers, dao creators, or nft artists. I’m not sure precisely what we’re afraid of, but there should be people we can reach out to that can let us know just how valid our concerns might be.
For myself, the move to Arbitrum would be fine, except it’s only really affordable when compared to eth mainnet. We’d probably want to continue with using the merkle root instead of airdropping as it would likely still cost a few hundred dollars worth of ether. I think everyone actively participating in this convo is aware that they’ll need to bridge ether to arbitrum and use it to pay gas, but I’m not sure that’s really widely understood by the entire dao. So I agree the vote may not have been fully informed, but I think in equal measure on both sides.
With polygon we have the added advantage of a robust series of bridges to other sidechains and centralized exchanges and offramps without bridging back to ethereum mainnet. This can be critical for lower income players.
to me this is more like a golden lining, encrusted with gemstones. I think it’s going to be awesome for metagame, and I’m glad you’re begrudgingly on board, fren.
It’s not that begrudging for me, I was kinda split myself. Also I agree with everything you said except the support for developers. I’ve found their docs and testnet to be a complete mess. Eitherway they def have the most utility and off ramps as you said.
The move seemed to seriously affect dat numba. Was it a success? I seem to recall Mis saying there were some very weird things happening with people having 4-5 x the value that they actually had showing up and being withdrawable, or some shit. Also that due to the way it was done a lot of arbitrage extraction took place, further squinktering the price?
Talked about this in the champs call a few weeks ago and it’s unclear if that’s what impacted the number. There were also two seed mintings/sell offs and a giant bear market downturn.
The other issues you’ve mentioned I believe are worked out, also arbitrage isn’t really a bad thing, it’s a good thing.
So it seems we’ll be there for now. Hopefully once we get some of these financials ironed out we can grow to the point where we’re on several chains. It’s also worth nothing that, for better or worse, we’ll likely still have the pool on mainchain. We have several inactive Patrons that I don’t expect will move their liquidity, so unless someone liquidates them we’ll still have our current pool.
