Balancer is similar to Uniswap and Curve, in that it enables anyone to create pools of tokens. The pool adjusts itself to keep the tokens equally weighted regardless of changes in their price. However, one unique feature of Balancer is that more than one token can be added and ETH isn’t required.

Although, Balancer isn’t the first DeFi protocol to make use of AMMs, however, it has brought a new face and approach to liquidity. The unique feature of the protocol is that it allows Liquidity providers to have up to eight assets per market which are weighted by percentage and rebalanced automatically.

With Balancer, users don’t have to deposit 50% of the desired asset, but are allowed to decide how much of a supported asset they wish to deposit. Another unique feature of Balancer Lab is that users can make a high return on assets that are in low demand through arbitrage opportunities and slippage-reduction. You can learn more about how Balancer works here.

How Many Balancer Tokens (BAL) Are There in Circulation?

Balancer wasn’t launched with a native token. However, in June 2020, they launched a governance token, $BAL, following the success of Compound’s token COMP. The purpose of the token is to allow for more decentralization and as an incentive for LP.

Of the total 100M tokens that were created, 25M were reserved for the team, core developers, investors and advisors. 5M tokens were allocated for the Balancer Ecosystem Fund, which would be used as incentives for strategic partners. Another 5M were allocated for the fundraising fund. This fund will be used by Balancer to support its operation and growth at future fundraisings.

The remaining tokens are to be mined by liquidity providers on the platform and are released at a rate of 145K per week. Provided the distribution rate is kept constant, it would take approx. 8.6 years to finish distributing the tokens.

For Balancer, security is a top priority and that is why the protocol has been fully audited three times by Trail of Bits, ConsenSys and OpenZeppelin. There are no admin keys or backdoors, hence, making it trustless, and the balancer pools are not upgradeable. Balancer does not support tokens that do not conform to the ERC-20 standard, even though they may be in use on some pools.

The tokens held on Balancer pools are not controlled by Balancer, but are smart contracts. Nevertheless, that does not remove the inherent risks of smart contracts. The configurable rights pools (CRPs) ensure that tokens with known issues are barred from being used in pools. It further ensures that all other tokens safely interact with the protocol