bZx Protocol (BZRX)

What Is BZx Protocol (BZRX)?

The bZx protocol is an Ethereum-based decentralized platform built for DeFi lending and margin and leverage trading that differentiates itself from competitors through a smart contract-powered token system.

Launched in 2018, offers two types of financial primitives, iTokens and pTokens, through its Fulcrum and Torque DeFi platform.

BZx’s trading front-end Fulcrum allows users to trade and or lend crypto assets through tokenized loans (iTokens) and tokenized positions (pTokens). Torque serves as bZx’s lending front-end web interface, allowing users to borrow funds for any purpose at a fixed interest rate.

The bZx system has 3 core ERC20 tokens: iTokens, pTokens and BZRX tokens, which each play an essential role in how bZx functions. In July 2020, bZX launched its native token BZXR in an Initial DEX Offering (IDO), on the Uniswap exchange.

Who Are the Founders of BZx?

BzX was founded by Tom Bean, a former Nokia engineer, and Kyle Kistner, a former researcher, both from Georgia, USA, who came up with the concept in August 2017 and published their white paper in February 2018. They respectively launched Fulcrum and Torque in June and October 2019.

The bZx team currently has 13 members and a list of influential partners and collaborators, including Chainlink, Kyber Network, Augur, Maker, DeFi Pulse, Signal Ventures and Deversifi.

What Makes BZx Protocol Unique?

BZx’s value proposition to DeFi users can be described as “everything is tokenized.” The protocol offers incentivized yield farming by refunding active users with 50% of the fees they pay in the form of BZRX.

This differentiates them from other liquidity mining protocols, which often offer exponential token rewards that dwarf the actual value of fees paid to the protocol. This oracle-based pricing method of only rewarding active users with tokens is considered a more sustainable model that adds more value to the protocol over the long term.

The protocol’s two financial primitives, iTokens and pTokens, are composable and can be used as collateral for loans or listed on exchanges. ITokens go up in value due to constant compound interest earned, while pTokens are issued to represent short and long leveraged margin trading positions.

Lenders who act as liquidity providers automatically receive iTokens for adding funds to liquidity pools, which can be exchanged at any time for their original funds plus accumulated interest.

BZX users who borrow funds to do margin trading on Fulcrum automatically receive various types of pTokens (“position tokens”), based on the liquidity pool they trade on, such as ETH-USDT, LINK-DAI or AAVE-USDC. Read more on how their pTokens work here.

Moreover, Fulcrum users don’t need to register or pay transaction fees and can use most Ethereum wallets like MetaMask to connect to the protocol.

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How Many BZx Protocol (BZRX) Coins Are There in Circulation?

bZx has a total supply of 1,030,000,000 BZRX tokens, with a current circulating supply of 140 million tokens.

BZRX tokens are to be distributed as follows:

Vesting (21.35%), Presale (13.65%), Team (20%), Builder Fund (20%), Security and Alignment Fund (5%) and Ecosystem Fund (20%). Of the 20% allocated to reward users, 17% will go towards fee rebates and 3% to the protocol’s usage.

How Is the BZx Network Secured?

The bZx protocol has been plagued by security flaws which resulted in three hacks in 2020. Despite having their smart contracts audited by firms such as Peckshield and Certik, the last hack in September resulted in an $8 million exploit due to “one misplaced line of code” that allowed hackers to duplicate assets. Impacted users were refunded in full by the Fulcrum “black swan” insurance fund.

The bZx team is working with developers and auditors to improve security and network upgrades are constantly rolled out.

Where Can You Buy bZx Protocol (BZRX) ?

The top exchanges for trading in bZx Protocol are currently Binance, HBTC, Binance.KR, CoinTiger and VCC Exchange. You can find others listed on our crypto exchanges page.

You can now purchase cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum directly by credit card in the fiat currency of your choice. To find out how, read more here.