Balancer is a community-driven protocol, automated portfolio manager, liquidity provider, and price sensor that empowers decentralized exchange and the automated portfolio management of tokens on the Ethereum blockchain and other EVM compatible systems.
Balancer Pools contains two or more tokens that traders can swap between. Liquidity Providers put their tokens in the pools in order to collect swap fees.
Balancer adopts powerful features to slash gas costs, super-charge capital efficiency, unlock arbitrage with zero-token starting capital, and open the door to custom AMMs.
Index Funds: Revolutionized
Pools with high token-counts are like index funds, allowing users to have access to broad exposure to a variety of tokens. Where Balancer differs from the traditional notion of an index fund, however, is in the fees.
Instead of paying fees to have a broker rebalance the pool, the pools collect fees as they're continuously rebalanced by traders making swaps. Furthermore, high token-count pools have the advantage of having many token pairs, creating additional opportunities to collect trading fees.
Balancer's WeightedPools are based on an N-dimensional invariant surface, a generalization of the constant product formula described by Vitalik Buterin.
Serving Everyone
With this mechanism, needs of both Liquidity Providers and Traders are served:
- Liquidity Providers collect trading fees, while the their portfolio is continuously rebalanced
- Traders gain access to an open, decentralized exchange that never closes, allowing them to swap what and when they like for low fees
