Balancer V2 Lending Provider for Asset Managers

Hi Guys,

Balancer has recently unveiled their new V2 product AMM, amongst a number of improvements from V1, V2 introduces a new feature; Asset Managers which allows a portion of the funds from a liquidity pool to be lent out to lending providers to boost the yield for a LP pool.

This graphic from the balancer team medium post is especially useful at illustrating how this works.

Links to articles

An asset manager is a smart contract that can automatically balance a portion of a pools funds to a lending provider (IDLE for example) to improve a pools yield.

Currently, AAVE has partnered as the first lending provider for V2, but I think it would be an awesome opportunity for IDLE to integrate with Balancer as a lending provider which would benefit balancer LP holders, and also increase TVL in idle (win/win).

The purpose of this post is to gauge community sentiment on this and to get the ball rolling so to speak.

CC: @Fernando

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Congratulations to @Fernando and the balancer team.
This is a feature that pools deeply have been missing and a great opportunity for idle finance to show why it’s the best yield aggregator in DeFi.

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This is a great concept and a great step to filing some of the natural inefficiencies of AMMs .

In doing this, it would be great to backtest and/or illustrate what marginal benefits Balancer LP’s get with this additional feature. Perhaps Balancer and IDLE can collaborate in a joint PR statement to help boost and explain the user value this provides.

Given the exorbitant fee costs at the moment, I imagine there’ll need to be a minimum threshold or something for when this Asset Management mechanism gets triggered.

This is definitely a win! Look forward to further discussions to get this on the roadmap.

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Thanks guys! This is a great idea, the open and permissionless ethos of Balancer Protocol allows for anyone to make cool integrations like with Idle through our Asset Managers. Looking forward to seeing the community’s sentiment!

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Hi there,

I have some updates regarding this feature, it is my understanding that the balancer team is still in development of a dedicated pool type for asset managers, and while asset managers are supported in the core contracts for v2, it would be better to wait for a dedicated pool type supporting managed assets to be ready and audited from the balancer side before formally starting this.

The dedicated pool will have a number of contract interfaces that would need to be implemented from our side to integrate an idle asset manager.

As a note on security, the idle asset manager would highly benefit from a peer review at a minimum (Probably through https://forum.dao.reviews/), because of the power it has to move funds from a pool. I think that Balancer will also putting out some future guidelines on asset managers, and the level of security that is required of them to be integrated with their UI in the future.

A grant could be spun up to develop this by a member of the community, perhaps Balancer could match a grant for such an initiative? @Fernando :eyes:. Otherwise this could be put on the roadmap as a future task for the dev league to commit to.

Looking forward to working together with both communities to make this happen :slight_smile:

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Hey Asaf,

We would love to match your grant, count on us! The right person for you to stay in touch with for Asset Managers is @greg (https://forum.balancer.finance/u/greg/summary). Excited to see what we’ll come up with here!

Cheers,
Fernando

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