The project then independently raised $3 million in funding as Balancer Labs in 2020. The round saw some 5 million BAL tokens sold to investors and 25 million tokens awarded to shareholders and employees (out of a total supply of 100 million tokens).

An additional 10 million BAL were set aside, with half being reserved for a fund used for contributors to the Balancer ecosystem and half reserved for sales to future investors.

BAL is the governance token for the Balancer Protocol. It can be used to vote on proposals and steer the direction of the protocol.

Balancer is a multi-token automated market maker (AMM) that functions as a self-balancing weighted portfolio protocol. Balancer is built on the Ethereum network. It allows anyone to create or add liquidity to customizable pools and earn trading fees. Compared to a typical constant product AMM model, Balancer uses a generalization formula that could be adjusted to any number of tokens at any amount of weightage.

It mimics the concept of an index fund where assets are regularly being reallocated based on the price and returns of the assets. Index fund is a common financial instrument that helps investors to achieve risk diversification by maintaining a controlled risk exposure to a portfolio. Rather than paying a portfolio manager to actively or programmatically manage users’ funds, Balancer helps solve a similar problem with smart contracts.

WE are currently only tracking lending rates for BAL with custodian lending providers who in turn give you an APY.

There are risks associated with custodial lending services, please do appropriate research.

Balancer began as a research project at a software consulting firm called BlockScience in 2018, founded by Fernando Martinelli and Mike McDonald.