Balancer Labs’ November 2021 Market Update: LBPs Hit All Time High Following Balancer-Gnosis Protocol Implementation

The stewards for programmable liquidity pools in DeFi, Balancer Labs, treads new ground, on a breakout run, this quarter. Dune Analytics reports show Balancer Labs broke previous all-time highs this November 2021 with its Liquidity Bootstrapping Pools (LBPs) raising over $105 Million, over the course of just three days. By way of background, Balancer’s LBPs are one of a class of liquidity pools that allow developers and start-ups to pre-program liquidity pools, to leverage and fund their ventures on their terms, while also offering pre-programmed rights, benefits and swap fees for instance, are also imparted to liquidity providers. 

Balancer’s LBP Volume shot up from 2 November to 5 November 2021 raising over $105,576,956 USD in that period. Side volumes stayed consistently within the 5-10 Million range during this period. An incredible feat not just for the platform, but also for startups and developers looking to utilise such LBPs to raise capital and funding for their ventures in the DeFi space. 

Dune Analytics further reports that in this time 6,313 transactions were made, by 3,900 participants, with a total trading volume of $138,580,702 USD.

For November 2021, the Total Locked Value (TVL) was $3.25 Billion, with liquidity distribution: 56% on V2, 34% on V1, 6% on Polygon, 4% on Arbitrum. 

The TVL by Decentralised Exchange (DEX) was split between Curve (46.7%), Uniswap (28.9%), SushiSwap (16.2%) and Balancer (8.1%), with Curve nearly doubling its TVL of the DEXs from June 1 to November 1, 2021. Notwithstanding, LBP generated ~30 Million of volume on other pools.

At a market level, the platform continues to build onto its solid track record. As at 30 November 2021, Balancer boasts over 58 LBPs, 17.5k liquidity providers and $3.4Bn in total liquidity. Also, a nice extra (but not insignificant)  titbit – to date, Balancer reports $72.3m in total fees have been earned by liquidity providers. 

Balancer-Gnosis Protocol 

The other exciting news for Balancer this November 2021 was the deployment of its Balancer-Gnosis Protocol (BGP), to fix a $730M+ problem around front-running bots. 

Balancer and Gnosis are each in their own right two of Ethereum’s leading protocols join forces.  So the joint Protocol means the combination of Balancer’s on-chain liquidity, vault architecture and Miner Extractable Value (MEV) Protections with Gnosis’ price-finding mechanism. 

The BGP will protect traders from bot exploits and value extraction with uniform clearing prices for batch trades. It also means traders can now also benefit from the upgrade with access to on-chain liquidity, MEV protection, better trading prices, and optimized gas costs in one place.

The BGP is now live as the default protocol within Balancer Labs DEX today and is expected to set the foundation for developers, start-ups and traders to fully capitalise on the liquidity pool offerings with Balancer Labs. 

About Balancer Labs  

Founded in 2018 in Lisbon, Portugal, Balancer Labs is on a mission to become the primary source of DeFi liquidity by providing the most flexible and powerful platform for asset management and decentralized exchange. Balancer offers an automated portfolio manager and liquidity provider, turning the concept of an index fund on its head: instead of paying fees to portfolio managers to rebalance your portfolio, you collect fees from traders who rebalance your portfolio by following arbitrage opportunities.