TL;DR
Transfer of the ownership of the stataToken helper contracts used exclusively by Balancer to their governance, in order for them to execute efficient and time-synced implementations upgrades.
Context
Previously, BGD presented to the community the stataToken, an ERC4626 wrapper on top of Aave aTokens, changing their behavior from balance to value growth, via an exchange rate.
These contracts are not part of the core Aave protocol, but permissionless utilities built on top, to be used by users and other systems.
One of their primary and most successful use cases is the Balancer protocol: powering their Boosted Pools (e.g. bb-USD), which deposit under the hood into Aave, via the stataTokens.
The Balancer team approached us regarding potential improvements:
- Change the underlying asset to be underlying on Aave instead of aToken (e.g. USDC instead of aUSDC).
- Improvement in the management of incentives on Aave v3.
However, as the stataTokens are currently Aave governance-controlled and multi-chain, both this operational effort and the (required) time synchronizing across networks becomes complicated, as proposals execute at different times (Ethereum ~5 days, all other networks ~7 days).
For that reason, and given that currently these non-core (helper) contracts are almost exclusively used by Balancer, we think the best solution is to transfer the ownership of these stataTokens to the Balancer governance and have them execute a sync upgrade.
The whole process will be reviewed by the BGD, Balancer Labs, and Certora teams, making sure all changes don’t break any interface compatibility.
Next steps
Being an operational proposal, similar to previous times, we will directly submit an AIP on-chain to move the appropriate permissions.
