August Budget Post
Welcome to the August budget.
This post will be broken into a few sections detailed below and will be open for community feedback for 3 days (72 hours). After which, if there is no contention, will be acted upon.
Updates for each month will be provided in the corresponding monthly threads.
The sections are as follows:
- Operational updates
- Budget and breakdown
- Reasoning
- New experiments
- Operational Goals
Operational Updates
Due to the ongoing operational complexity we have increased the approved LDO in the budget by a flat ~10%. The reason is to provide a buffer between monthly budget updates until we can get additional resources to streamline the process (ongoing). Historically this is significantly more than required and will be adjusted over time downwards.
We have included budgeted vs actual spend for August and will continue this process going forward.
@carvas @Chuck and @McNut been contributing on reWARDS V2 reporting and accountability processes with the committee. We will be posting an update on the work this week with learnings, goals and timelines.
The addition of transaction tracking on a public site with addresses for the community to track on chain was delayed to this month due to additional priorities.
Budget and Breakdown
The Auguest budget calls for 4,633,200 LDO.
4,212,000 LDO distributed across the following pools and networks with the remaining 421,200 LDO held for unaccounted needs during the month.
The colors correspond to an increase or decrease of LDO for the month.
edit: I mixed up the red (increase) and green (decrease) 
this month.
An easier to view PDF is provided:
Reasoning and Analysis
We are continuing to experiment with bribes and indirect incentives to increase capital efficiency in the V2 work listed above.
Solana
Continuing to round out the defi integrations and are finalizing work on our SDK for easier integrations with partners.
Ethereum
Notable changes
- We have redirected all Balancer direct incentives to bribes due to efficiency.
L2 - Arbitrum & Optimism
- Pending an audit, we expect to launch on L2s this month with the priority being AMMs/DEXs for user experience and deeper integrations next month.
Kusama (KSM)
No updates.
Polkadot (DOT)
No updates
Polygon (MATIC)
Chainlink oracles were approved and have unblocked work on Aave.
Uni V3 pool is live and already performing better than expected in capital efficiency.
Launched vaults with Beefy finance which have been highly effective in helping users get involved with Polygon defi.
New Experiments
The continued focus is on optimization models this month with a focus on Curve and Balancer ecosystems.
As we now have a functional Uni V3 pool on Polygon we will be exploring adding additional pools on ETH mainnet and L2s.
Operational Goals
The main priority in August is standing up V2 optimization and start using that to inform decisions in September. An update will be posted this week.
