The Bancorian | A Weekly Summary-September 19th 2021

9 min readSep 23, 2021

💻 Development

As work on Bancor V3 contracts progresses, Nate shared in a recent AMA that BNT rewards re-staking is about to get a lot easier in Bancor V3:

There are new UI screens that we have pushed out to the beta interface and we are looking to get feedback on. This includes:

A new pools page 🤿
A new voting interface ☑️
A new tokens page 💰

Both of these new interfaces are being added to beta.bancor.network which is powered by our new APIs and performance will be faster. We will eventually shift our entire web application over to the new interface.

The beta interface does not include charts yet but we are happy to report that these will absolutely be a part of the V3 design. The infrastructure to support data analytics is now available and charts will be included with the launch of V3. In the future, every token will be clickable and will open the swap interface with charts on the side. 📊

🌐 Ecosystem

🔥Bancor Vortex

The vortex continues burning vBNT and locking BNT in the protocol forever. This week we saw roughly ~46.6K in vBNT that was burned by the vortex. At current BNT prices (~$3.50) this equates to ~$163K worth of $BNT locked forever. 🔒

+----------------+--------------+
|      time      | burnedamount |
+----------------+--------------+
| 9/12/2021 0:00 |   4254.94482 |
| 9/13/2021 0:00 |  4539.300557 |
| 9/14/2021 0:00 |  7078.030355 |
| 9/15/2021 0:00 |  5694.046328 |
| 9/16/2021 0:00 |  6673.765771 |
| 9/17/2021 0:00 |  10469.35267 |
| 9/18/2021 0:00 |  7930.074181 |
| Sum            |  46639.51468 |
+----------------+--------------+

Overall, the cumulative burned amount increase from ~1.136m on 9/11 to ~1.183m on 9/18.

📊 Key Metrics

7-day total cumulative fee revenue: ~$1.0m

30-day total fee revenue: ~$5.6m

Source: token terminal

📈 The average daily revenue for the past 7 days has been at around ~143K. 30-day trading fee revenue is up over ~14% for the previous 30 days. Annualized, that’s around ~$68.1m in annual trading fees paid to LPs.

💰In terms of protocol revenue, Bancor is the second largest DEX on Ethereum, with around $2.67m in monthly revenue earned by $BNT holders. It is ranked the 7th lowest by Price to Sales (P/S) ratio compared to other crypto projects

Left: Protocol Revenue (30 Days) Right: Price to Sales ratio (P/S)

Source: token terminal

🔌Integrations and Updates

Sygnum Bank announced that they now offer regulated banking services for Bancor Network Token ($BNT). You can catch the full press press release which has more details. Nate Hindman, Head of Growth at Bancor Protocol: “We are excited to see Sygnum offer its clients greater access to DeFi protocols and support new innovations emerging in digital asset technology. We look forward to working with Sygnum to usher in novel interactions between institutional users and protocols like Bancor, and to create safe and simple ways for regulated players to plug into yield generating DeFi products.”
Basic Attention Token ($BAT) had a co-investment increase of 400K $BNT and space has now opened up in the pool for BAT LPs to deposit single sided with impermanent loss protection.
iExec RLC ($RLC) had the pool swap fees increased to .2% in order to generate more revenue for LPs while at the same time bringing us on par with other competing $RLC pools on other DEXes.
Instadapp pool ($INST) was whitelisted last week and has been seeded. There is currently ~661K of $INST free space available for any LPs that are looking to deposit their tokens single sided with IL protection.

💪Social Channels

🎉You just win

Regulated banking services is now available for $BNT via Sygnum Bank. We have heard from the team over the past few months that they are in talks with banks and institutions that are looking to make $BNT available to their clients in addition to onboard users to our platform. 🤔…perhaps there is more in store on this front 👀.

🎲Random Musings

Bancorians are always active on the social channels and this week was no different. 👇👇

Seems like there are some good indicators for $BNT when applying some technical analysis 🔍

The list of project treasuries that have trusted Bancor with a portion of their funds includes BarnBridge, Harvest Finance, and UMA. Ultimately, Bancor is the only place that co-invests together with other communities and is a safe haven for LPs. 🏦

More giveaways to be planned, make sure to follow so that you don’t miss any. Thanks to DIGITALAX for the awesome chainlink x Bancor tee👕

Perhaps this 🐳 knows something that you don’t? What are you waiting for anon? Join us!

🎩Bancorians in the Wild

A collection of weekly tweets from some of the greatest Bancorians 🧠💪

☑️Governance

👈Previous Proposals

This past week (9/12/21), we saw a number of proposals on snapshot that were able to meet quorum and supermajority requirements:

We also had a couple of proposals that failed to meet quorum requirements:

👉Current Proposals

For this week (9/19/21), there is currently a single proposal up for voting:

Proposal: Enable LM rewards on EDEN-BNT pool plus 400K Co-Investment Increase in exchange for an EDEN slot

Head over to snapshot to cast your votes.

❗️ If you aren’t voting regularly make sure you unstake your vBNT from governance and delegate instead. Self-nominated delegates maintain a page on Discourse to inform other community members of their intended voting behavior. If you disagree with the way your delegate votes, you can always vote manually to override their decision on your behalf.❗️

☎️ Bancor Weekly Call

In this week’s Community Call recording, Bancor shared the development updates above and featured three teams to discuss collaborations with the Bancor ecosystem: Eden Network, Ferrum Network, and Snapshot.

Eden team pitch for Liquidity Mining Rewards (10:01)

Recap: Eden is a transaction priority network using economic incentives to encourage miners to prioritize end-user transactions; all of the rules of priority are transparent and live on-chain within slots that get sent to Eden blocks. Bancor is currently a slot tenant, so end users who submit transactions to the Bancor network get prioritized. Eden Network is requesting an LM program in return for Bancor’s continued status as a slot tenant.

Why should Bancor pay $53 per trade for a service that might protect 1% of those trades? If that’s not accurate, then what is the percentage of trades that gets prioritized?

According to Eden, a little over 50% of Bancor transactions have been prioritized. However, it is fairly expensive per trade, so can it give Bancor value in other ways? We can see both pros and cons, it’s worth experimenting to see how to rid Bancor users of hidden costs.

Is Eden Network aware that any transaction with MEV right now provides 0 protection given that slot tenant number 1 is currently a front-running and sandwiching MEV bot?

The slots behave differently to other transaction bundles — as a slot owner, you can’t bring forward or manipulate somebody else’s transaction order. Transaction bundles mean that arbs can take a single transaction from a pool and perform sandwich attacks on other trades; the proliferation of this behaviour has led to sandwich attacks everywhere. Here, the slots are only prioritizing a user’s trades, not allowing them to bundle and perform sandwich attacks.

Is there anywhere that our community can go to learn about how the slots work?

Eden.io talks about the difference between slots and bundles. Check out Eden’s whitepaper too.

The pool on Sushiswap is 10m/day at the moment. Doesn’t that make the liquidity on Bancor quite low? Shouldn’t we fill the pool here up in order to compete?

Mark: Growing pools is partially the function of LM, and we can work with the Eden team on making that happen.

An introduction to Ferrum Network (25:49)

“Ferrum Network is a deflationary cross-chain Blockchain as a Service DeFi company that specializes in adding token utility and advisory services to projects across the crypto space.

Ferrum builds white-label blockchain solutions that power Startups and established organizations, enabling them to get their product to market faster.”

The Ferrum-Bancor collaboration plans to see the buy-back mechanism for FRM being moved to Bancor now that Bancor has been whitelisted. Every time they use the buy-back, there’ll be an announcement tagging @Bancor just to get the Ferrum community more aware of Bancor’s product. Outside of that, the Ferrum Network team recognizes the value of LPing on Bancor over other AMMs and will work to raise awareness of the fact in the coming week.

A session with Nathan from Snapshot (35:14)

“Snapshot is a decentralized voting system. It’s used by several companies in the DeFI ecosystem space to help survey users. It uses off-chain signature techniques to make voting feeless.”

Voting wasn’t always free — it was a huge bottleneck in achieving governance participation. Snapshot has been a godsend to Bancor, allowing users to vote for free. Bancor has since become one of the most active DAOs in DeFi. We have gone from 1 proposal a week to 1 proposal day or more.

The Snapshot team has enjoyed watching Bancor be able to engage with its community without cost friction since the integration of Bancor. Now, Snapshot is exploring new functionalities such as reward systems for governance participation, and is curious to get our community’s thoughts.

Does Snapshot have any concrete plans to secure their system against a potential exploit?

Yes, it has a goal in mind of becoming a DAO in of itself, and these plans involve being incorporated with blockchain to move votes on-chain without incurring costs for users. The long-term aim is to provide the same security as smart contracts. Right now, there’s a great system that works, but L2 solutions will allow for greater opportunities to maximize security.

Will there be an abstain option on Snapshot in the future? Some voters are unsure, but don’t want their presence to be excluded from quorum.

It’s a very interesting idea and can be built into the product very easily. It may also be technically possible to count towards quorum without actively ‘abstaining’. Nathan will consult the technical team on the idea.

Nathan will continue to engage with us on Discourse.

Q&A (1:02:00)

Have we thought about being able to move BNT from one pool to another without unstaking and waiting 24 hours?

Mark: V3 fixes this! In fact, think of everything that we all know could be better on v2.1: they’ve all been prioritized to be fixed in V3. This includes high gas fees.

Connect Projects with Steven, Bancor Business Development Lead:

Are there tokens you’re holding that we should whitelist on Bancor? DM @FoxSteven about it or connect us with any community leaders / core contributors on the project. Steven leads all our BD efforts and will connect with the team and work with them to get whitelisted or build a deeper pool.

Bancor Grants:

We have content grants active at all times. Any users that want to create videos or guides, please reach out to Nate Hindman (@NateHindman on twitter or telegram).
We have analytics grants. If you want to work on Bancor data projects or if you are good with working on blockchain data and APIs, we can always use your help!
As always, we have rolling developer grants for those who want to build and innovate on Bancor’s infrastructure.