Balancer is a decentralized Ethereum-based exchange and one of the leading automated market makers (AMMs) in the cryptocurrency world. It runs on the Ethereum mainnet and allows users to benefit from several features to create DeFi products.
It was launched back in 2019 by the founders of Balancer Labs – Mike McDonald and Fernando Martinelli. Both co-founders are veteran contributors to the crypto industry and have collaborated to work on other blockchains and DeFi projects.
The development of Balancer began in 2018 with its bronze release. The rest of the three phases went live in 2020. The bronze release followed a round of funding in March 2020, with Balancer raising $3 million.
In the earlier years of Balancer’s launch, about 100 million BAL tokens (Balancer’s utility token) were minted. The protocol released 75% of them to miners and distributed 25% among its developers and shareholders. In the process, it sold out 5 million tokens to the public.
Balancer allows users to trade at optimal prices. The protocol encourages efficient trading via pooling crowdsourced liquidity from investor portfolios while using its Smart Order Routing feature to find the best prices for traders.
Users can exchange any combination of ERC-20 tokens on Balancer and get access to intelligent pricing, MEV protection, and gas subsidies/optimizations.