Progressing Towards Further Decentralization
It’s an exciting time in the Badger ecosystem. After nearly a year of active development, Badger is on the cusp of bringing the DAO’s first DeFi primitive to life in EBTC. One that is built on the foundational principles of decentralization and censorship resistance. An immutable synthetic BTC powered by Ethereum staking with minimized governance, extreme transparency and self-sustaining utility.
Furthermore, the Badger councils along with the community have worked hard to ensure operations are significantly more efficient, the DAO’s treasury is strong and growing, unprofitable products/protocols have been deprecated and emissions reduced to zero. These actions helped to strengthen Badger’s position, further enabling Badger to weather extremely difficult market conditions and continue building.
Read the Vault Discontinuation Policy
As the launch of EBTC quickly approaches, Badger continues to make significant strides toward a new state where principles of decentralization and censorship resistance are cemented across all technology developed within the ecosystem, including DAO operations.
What does this new state look like?
- The only protocol powered by BadgerDAO is an immutable asset with minimized governance that anyone can build on with support from the greater Badger ecosystem.
- A governance framework with community empowered councils acting in the best interest of token holders.
- Automated and transparent public financials that anyone can gather insight from.
- A strong multisig infrastructure that allows for transparent technical operations and the ability to flourish without reliance on the traditional financial system.
- Minimized operational spend, token incentives and a well balanced treasury portfolio to withstand dynamic market conditions.
- A variety of BADGER token utility opportunities for holders on leading DeFi protocols like Balancer, Curve, Convex, Aura, Frax etc., supported by treasury operations.
- DAO developed protocol smart contracts that are no longer managed by multisigs.
Significant effort has already been made to ensure that Treasury Decisions, DAO Multisigs, Supporting Transactions, and Financials are easily accessible and transparently visible to users in real time. With that said, the work must continue.
The actions outlined in this post will further enable the DAO and its treasury to focus all efforts on enabling growth and development around EBTC while further driving utility for the BADGER token and its holders. This puts Badger in a position to flourish when the next bull market begins to accelerate.
To fully realize this new state and make strides toward further decentralization and censorship resistance, Badger must discontinue remaining products, migrate the existing app into a legacy state, launch EBTC and its supporting dapp and finally, burn any keys that enable multisig management of existing protocol smart contracts. Although much of this can be enacted immediately, there are contributing factors that extend the timeframe for fully completing this transition.
Below is the plan to get there.
The Transition Plan
Step 1
Since the establishment of the Vault Discontinuation Policy, the majority of Badger’s LP vaults have been discontinued on the grounds of not meeting the criteria for financial performance. This exercise has resulted in significant cost savings for the DAO and its treasury. The next logical step forward is to begin transitioning the remaining influence focused vault products into a similar state over the next several months.
Transition will begin this week and as such, the locking function will be disabled for the following influence vaults although, depositing will remain open.
- bveCVX
- graviAURA
A formal announcement will be made once these changes have been made.
Aside from disabling the locking function, these vaults will continue to operate as usual, harvesting and distributing rewards to depositors until the final unlock concludes in early October 2023. Consistent updates around these actions will be shared with the community.
In addition, the following influence support vaults or ecosystem helpers will be discontinued which means they will no longer be harvested or earned, and will only be visible to existing depositors.
- auraBAL
- cvxCRV
- CVX/bveCVX
Withdrawals for all transitioning and discontinued vaults will continue to operate as intended; however, as part of this plan, the Badger app will be migrated to a legacy state. All depositors looking to withdraw assets from these vaults will need to visit https://legacy.badger.com in order to do so.
Step 2
Launch the EBTC protocol on mainnet along with the new EBTC website and dapp.
The protocol is currently beginning its second formal audit this week and an update on the projected launch date will be provided soon.
In the coming weeks there will be the white paper release followed by launch on testnet.
Step 3
The final step in this transition plan will result in the burning of all keys and will take place following the final unlock in October of this year. At this time BadgerDAO will relinquish all permissions over pre-existing vault products marking a significant achievement toward further decentralization and immutability. This effort will make way for a renewed focus and clarity around developing foundational DeFi infrastructure on top of EBTC.
Enhancing and maintaining Badger token utility across the DeFi ecosystem will remain a key priority when developing and releasing new products. Holders who are interested in migrating funds from the vaults mentioned above can visit https://legacy.badger.com once the transition has been enacted later this week. All depositors with funds in previously discontinued vaults can withdraw at https://legacy.badger.finance.
Now more than ever is the time to build and evolve.
Be relentless, Be Badgers.