GRFC: Panda Pod 2nd Term Proposal

Decentralisation
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1

Summary

This proposal is for Gro DAO to fund the Panda product pod for another term, with 3 voting options:

  1. Fund Panda Pod for another 6-month term
  2. Fund panda pod for a 1 month extension
  3. Rejection of the all options above

The proposal will be open for comments over the next 5 days.

Background

In the past six months, Panda Pod has achieved over 100% on its two terms OKRs, having taken on additional objectives mid-term to assist in high urgency and important tasks that the DAO needed to have handled. You can see our OKRs and reviews here

Below is a summary of our work from the 1st term:

  1. Design and implement an entirely cross-chain relayer to extend the investment of GVT from other chains

    • Smart contracts
    • Web UI design, modification and implementation Testnet env
    • Collected and used feedback from 19 users to assist the design and optimization of the relayer
    • Beta tested our relayer with 11 Gro DAO members and 6 internal Panda pod members;

  2. Strategy research, complete the research on strategies such as lvUSD, crvUSD, etc., and collect strategies that can be further researched and developed in the future

  3. [Extra] Implement the core protocol monitoring and alerting service. Added critical alerts (metapool slippage, asset ratio and other abnormal assets change checks) to inform the community. This was an additional objective that was added mid-term to support the DAO.

  4. Compare the cost and performance of several bridge services such as stargate, connext, across, cbridge and L2 native bridges. Select proper service for the cross-chain relayer.

  5. Analyze the Multichain bridge crash issue to have deeper understand of the risk of utilizing bridge services

  6. Apply for the emergency multisign member to cover more time zones of emergency situations.

  7. Implement the graph to show the operation data between multiple chains

  8. Build the dashboard to monitor the cross-chain status.
    Testnet: wagmi

  9. Create the auto task scripts to manage the admin functions of the cross chain relayer

Composition

Following the Gro DAO collaboration framework 2, the Panda Product Pod will include contributors who participate in engineering, product design, and product management.

4 full-time contributors and 2 part-time would form the Panda Product Pod:

  • WW (backend & smart contract)
  • LH (backend & smart contract)
  • VW (backend & smart contract)
  • SC (product & pod facilitator)
  • Kwww (product)
  • EW (front-end)

Budget

6 month mandate - Team budget of 276,000 USDC to cover the 6 contributors for 6 months + 6,000 USDC to cover remaining audit costs

1 month mandate - Team budget of $49,000 USDC to cover the 6 contributors for 1 month + 6,000 USDC to cover remaining audit costs

Proposal Voting Options

  1. New Mandate: 6 months

With the Gro DAO’s funding support, the Panda Pod will be able to focus on researching and implementing new strategies that will increase the APYs offered by PWRD and GVT and address the core critical problem with the protocol today.

  • Launch the cross-chain deposit relayer
  • Keep improving the web ui and dashboard of the cross-chain relayer
  • Continue to maintain the alerting system
  • Introduce new strategies to community and vote for whitelist those opportunities
  • Build the base strategy to support invest with other yield token than 3crv (including building modules that manage slippage and check price oracles)
  • Implement the whitelisted strategies
  • Setup the stop loss logic and review with other pods
  • Update monitoring and alerting service to support new critical checkpoints
  • Update web and middle layer to properly show the assets distribution and exposure.
  • Support emergency signature to cover more time zones.
  1. 1 month extension
    Enable Panda pod to finish testing, auditing, and launching the deposit relayer, and start to identify strategies for implementation in a 2nd term

In the event that the aforementioned option is not approved, the Panda team will carefully review the proposal and engage in a thorough dialogue with the community to incorporate any feedback received. This collaborative approach will enable us to refine the proposal and ultimately identify the most suitable solution that aligns with the community’s interests and expectations.

Reporting

Panda Product Pod will update the DAO on its progress regularly through the community channels such as Community Forum, Discord, and Telegram.

In addition, there will be a monthly report to summarize progress achieved and high-level plans for the next months on the Community Forum.

The Panda Pod is eager to receive feedback and encourages active participation from the community in shaping the future of its endeavors, ultimately fostering a collaborative environment that drives the success of Gro DAO’s mission.

next steps

Give indication whether you would support this proposal or not

  • I support a 2nd full term for Panda pod
  • I support a 1 month extension for Panda pod
  • I have suggestions
0 voters
2 Likes
2

thanks for sharing. A few questions and comments:

  • it would be good to share you OKRs and performance against these OKRs in the past 6 months, so the DAO can understand the quality of the work delivered so far.
  • Was there any excess budget from the initial term that will be carried over (if this proposal is approved), and if so, how much?
  • Am I right in understanding that the 15k USDC per strategy is for audits of each strategy?
1 Like
3

Appreciate the writeup kwww! I have one suggestion for another voting option that would be great to hear others’ opinions on. In short, adding a 1-month sprint voting option to prioritize testing, auditing, finalizing, and shipping the deposit relayer. And if this is not possible, then I’d be curious to know what the proposed timeline of completion is.

A few retrospective points below:

  • To paraphrase the Panda Product Pod Term 1 Proposal and subsequent discussion, the primary focus of term 1 was on the deposit relayer since it may be faster to deliver. Other cross-chain strategies would be built on top of that and require a longer proving period before being production ready. There was also talk about multi-strategy support and multiple vaults that could eventually become incentivized by liquidity guages in the future.

  • Most or all of this would seem to be downstream of the deployment of a deposit relayer, which is now contingent upon a second term of the Panda Pod.

  • In the Groda Pod’s 2nd term proposal, one of the proposed voting options was to “Extend the current mandate for 1-month” to prioritize a smaller set of essential deliverables. If it had been approved, this 1-month sprint/extension would have been funded from the budget surplus of Groda’s first term. I think this concept could be applied to the Panda Pod as well.

After the “sprint” extension in which the deposit relayer would be delivered, the Panda Pod can present a refined proposal for a next 6-month term.

I like the concept of the deposit relayer, and there continues to be excitement around the launch of L2s and the coming of EIP-4844. Although DeFi stablecoin liquidity and TVL continues to be heavily concentrated in Ethereum mainnet, I’d prefer for Gro Protocol to be ready to take full advantage with a competitive product if there is an increase in liquidity from L2s later this year or next. There is also quite a bit of buzz around cross-chain transfer/interoperability protocols from the likes of Circle, Chainlink, and (projects building on) Eigenlayer. Even Frax’s admittedly simpler and more centralized Fraxferry tool.

Point being, competition is heating up and it would be great to have at least one product released sooner, for the Gro DAO to rally around.

1 Like
4

  • our cycle 1 OKR summary

  • in terms of current cycle progress, we’ve received quotes from 3 audit firms and will select one to run with this week; we are also scheduling testing sessions with DAO members

  • There was some unutilized budget for part-time contributors, which returns to the DAO treasury, so we can consider this an entirely new budget request;

  • Yes, 15k USDC per strategy is for audit services; if quotes received are higher, then we may reduce and prioritize which strategies we audit first

5

I appreciate the suggestion @jaypow! I think 1 month sprint might be a good option to get the product launched; if we go down this route, I would suggest that we include a bit of the strategy research work as well so we are making progress while waiting for the audit firm to complete their work.
Critical for us is to think about what new risks we need to manage when we expand the set of strategies outside of the Curve/Convex ecosystem

1 Like
6

to date, have current Gro protocol strategies gone through audits?

7

will have to ask folks to re-vote as I’ve added the 1 month extension option to the poll

@raambo we should consider auditing the first contract at least that is non-3crv as it will likely introduce new risk management protocol code

8

Thanks for the consideration! Would the 1-month extension use the unspent budget from term 1, or would it require a new budget request?

Also, I know that there are multiple contingencies and moving parts in the deposit relayer and other plans, but would you expect the audit firm to complete their work before the 1-month extension finishes? I think seeing an impactful product or strategy launch from the Panda Pod prior to the next term would significantly boost the DAO’s confidence in supporting another 6-month term.

9

to clarify, will there be 2 or 3 voting options now? The summary at the top only shows 2.

10

@kwww - I think the USD 15k audit cost per strategy is over-optimistic - when you are talking about developing this amount of strategies I also understand that you’ve included a variation of the same strategy, e.g. say a compound strategy that targets usdc, dai and usdt would be considered 3 strategies. If we assume15k per strategy here it would be 45k to audit the “compound” strategy, which seems like a more reasonable amount. tl;dr I would rephrase the number of strategies you are planning to develop to exclude variations of the same strategy, and also reconsider audit costs for the strategies.

11

2 options in signalling vote as of now (full term vs 1 month extension)

12

this would be a new budget request as there is not enough unspent budget to cover a full month in the case of an extension;

I do worry about over or underbudgeting for audits - to @KD0x701137 point, we’ve found that we underbudgeted for audits in term 1, as we’ve received bids for 36k and 43k, against our budget of only 30k

An alternative is to not specify the audit budget in this vote; rather, in each future vote on a new strategy, we will vote on both the inclusion of the strategy as well as the allocation of audit budget (which we can request more accurate bids for at that time)

13

there should be a ‘reject’ and ‘abstain’ option as well

14

Re prior yield strategy research

  • As per my comments in the research documents, none of the research actually assesses strategy feasibility. E.g. Stargate technically doesn’t work because withdrawals are not synchronous, but this issue is not considered. crvUSD is just a general description of the new protocol (similar to Wojak’s thread a while back) and doesn’t comment or analyse how it could be used to generate yield. lvUSD doesn’t touch on pool balance / withdrawal options in case of curve pool imbalance.
  • In the last period, the protocol has had a large share of its TVL in the reserves and Panda has not helped to improve that - I do not think the DAO should extend this mandate for Panda.

Re cross-chain relayer

  • Can you attach a link to the final design/architecture?
  • Has this code been reviewed internally by Groda before audit? It’s best practice to perform code review(s) before paying for an audit to ensure potential low hanging fruits are fixed before buying an audit.

Re budget

  • Is there a reconciliation of budget vs actuals (like Groda did at end of their term)?

I think the DAO should also have an option for what’s required in order to ship only the cross-chain relayer / maybe that’s the 1-month extension?

15

For the cross-chain relayer, we had a meeting with Groda team to prepare for the audit.

  1. The link to tech design is Tech Design. We keep adding more module-level descriptions based on previous audit experience.
  2. We are working with KD to perform the cross-pod code review before the final audit. The source code and related documents were shared. Will keep updating the status.
16

we’ve completely revamped the crvUSD write-up to reflect the opportunities in Convex crvUSD/USDC and crvUSD/USDT here https://www.notion.so/grodao/crvUSD-pool-strategies-69a567f7497f44e9b674adf519899645 - addressing your feedback from before
lvUSD unfortunately suffered from low TVL soon after our report was written and was removed from consideration prior
We hope that this revamped crvUSD write-up shows the depth of consideration we’re taking to strategy research

and the signalling vote in the top post does offer the option of a 1-month extension where we focus purely on launching the cross chain relayer

1 Like
17

Just a quick TLDR summary of the above comments as well as some updates

  1. Panda Pod has in its first term exceeded OKR targets reaching 111% in cycle 1 and 145% in cycle 2 (despite not fully achieving certain KRs, the pod has exceeded or taken on new objectives mid-term to help the DAO)
  2. We have coordinated with @Levi and Groda Pod and reached consensus that if the full 6-month term is approved for Panda Pod, Panda pod will take ownership of strategy development, enabling Groda pod to focus their Pod on new product development.
  3. We are planning to request audit funds for each strategy specifically after we have implemented them as this will create the most accurate funding request.
  4. We have just posted the RFC for crvUSD/USDC Convex, which is the result of strategy research from the 1st term
1 Like
18

any update on the budget reconciliation data (i.e. how budget was spent) from this term?

Examples:

19

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Here’s the budget from 1st term and 1-month extension details. Here are the reasons for time extension and budget details.

scope increase

  • implemented alert & monitoring framework for v1 and G^2 smartcontracts

realyer delay causes

  • The cross chain relayer work was more complex than expected, e.g. integrating with multichain contract
  • The bridge we chose ran into hack issues, so we had to pick a different bridge and rebuild

budget

  • under-budgeted for audit, 36k vs 30k
  • sentio software cost was not in original budget