Balancer Launches on Polygon with $10M Rewards Program

Essential DeFi protocol Balancer is launching a joint rewards program with Polygon. 

Balancer Heads to Polygon 

Balancer has launched on Polygon.

The popular decentralized exchange protocol, which forms part of Ethereum’s DeFi ecosystem, announced it was heading to the Polygon network Thursday. 

We are thrilled to announce that Balancer Protocol has expanded to layer 2 solution @0xPolygon.

We believe that Balancer Labs and Polygon can work closely to increase liquidity in DeFi, lower trading fees to zero, and make DeFi accessible to everybody!https://t.co/JZGvO6I2Cj

— Balancer (@Balancer) July 1, 2021

In a blog post, Balancer noted that “with near-zero fees to make a trade, unique experimentation for pools becomes possible.”

Polygon is an Ethereum scaling solution that’s become known for offering a similar DeFi experience to the Layer 1 base chain at a fraction of the cost. Users have to migrate their funds from Ethereum to the network through a bridge. 

Polygon’s popularity surged this year when protocols like Curve, Aave, and SushiSwap launched on the network. Balancer is the latest Ethereum mainstay that’s hoping to leverage Polygon’s low fees. Similar to Curve, Balancer uses liquidity pools that allow DeFi traders to swap between assets. Its unique feature is that it offers pools with multiple assets rather than just the two, which is common practice across other automated market makers. 

Fernando Martinelli, Balancer Labs CEO and co-founder, said of the project’s move: 

“Polygon has become one of the preferred Layer 2s for Ethereum. We have noticed the amount of traction that Polygon has been getting and the transaction experience that it provides and Balancer wants that experience for our community and users. Polygon will enhance Balancer’s ability to scale to more Layer 2s.”

Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal added that he was “extremely thrilled” about the update. 

Balancer and Polygon are offering token rewards to incentivize users onto the Balancer’s Polygon pools. 25,000 BAL, 375,000 MATIC, and 30,000 QI are set to be distributed weekly across the protocol’s “index-like” pools. 

The pools include a “base pool” containing WMATIC, USDC, WETH, and BAL, two “DeFi indices” containing LINK, WETH, BAL, and AAVE, a “Polygon Index” containing SUSHI, WMATIC, USDC, QI, WETH, QUICK, BAL, and ADDY, and a “Qi Dao ecosystem pool” containing WMATIC, USDC, QI, BAL, and MAI. There’s also a “base stable pool” containing the stablecoins USDT, USDC, DAI, and MAI. 

The rewards commenced on Jun. 28, and Balancer’s blog post indicates that more pools will be added to the network in the future. 

Disclosure: At the time of writing, the author of this feature owned ETH, ETH2X-FLI, AAVE, CRV, SUSHI, USDC, USDT, and MATIC. They also had exposure to BAL in a cryptocurrency index.