Onboarding to Balancer v2
Balancer v2 has been a core pillar of DeFi since 2021. By leveraging innovative pool types Balancer v2 has attracted liquidity in the liquid staking token (LST) and liquid restaking token (LRT) sector.
Balancer Technology provides decentralised infrastructure for DAOs, which enables efficient scaling of Yield Bearing assets, creating advanced Governance positions, and developing customised pool types. In addition, the Balancer ecosystem facilitates the streamlined scaling of liquidity for DAOs through core pool incentive flywheels and its network of liquidity enhancing protocols.
Onboarding Steps
Onboarding to Balancer v2's tech stack involves various steps depending on the specific needs. In general the onboarding journey consists of following steps:
- Choosing and launching your pool
- Providing initial liquidity
- Onboard to Balancer's gauge system
- Voting Incentive Markets
Choosing and Launching A Pool
Balancer v2 offers a wide variety of exciting pool types. The following table provides a rough overview of examples and use cases
| Pool Type | Use-Cases | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Composable Table Pool | Provision of highly correlated asset liquidity | wstETH:WETH pool on mainnet |
| Weighted Pools incl. 80/20 | Creation of pools with any weight distribution with up to 8 tokens. | BAL:WETH 80:20 pool |
| Gyroscope E-CLPs | Specialized pools with customized liquidity curves | USDC:GYD Stable Pool on mainnet |
| Managed pools | Specialized pools with dynamic pool weights. See Kassandra Finance for an example implementation use-case | Example index fund on Avalanche |
- On Balancer v2, many projects choose to utilize our highly efficient Composable Stable Pool technology. This allows to deploy deep liquidity while guaranteeing correct trades through rate provider technology. Furthermore, by harnessing our vault architecture design, pools benefit from direct trading routes, aggregator integration and deep liquidity.
- Our flexible weighted pool design allows for innovative pool design, letting you choose between any target weights and up to 8 token pools opening up the possibility to host governance token liquidity or build exciting index-fund like products.
- Gyroscopes E-CLPs leverage custom trading curves for even higher utilization rates and efficiency
- Managed pools are experimental products. Although certain solutions exist, their support is limited.
Providing initial liquidity
Depending on the pool type, you can bootstrap liquidity directly through our UI or our community tooling:
- For weighted pools, use the pool creation UI from the Balancer v2 front-end
- For Composable Stable pools, use the community pool creator tool
- If you are considering to deploy liquidity with a yield-bearing asset, consult our yield-bearing token onboarding guide
- For E-CLP liquidity pools, consult with Gyroscope to set up your customized E-CLP
Token Whitelisting
Whitelist your token by doing a Pull-Request here. This is needed to fully enable trading of your token on our platform.
- Provide token images and store png files with the token address like
0xba100000625a3754423978a60c9317c58a424e3D.png - Update
tokenlists/balancer/tokensand the corresponding network typescript file by adding your token address ( e.g.tokenlists/balancer/tokens/arbitrum/0x…)
Onboard to Balancer's gauge system
If your project intends to receive BAL rewards, consult our Gauge Onboarding docs guiding you through any further steps needed.
Tips
Are you interested in receiving core pool status? Read here
Balancer's gauge system enables you to receive token rewards on your pool by providing a contract where Balancer BPTs can be staked. To receive BAL rewards in particular, a gauge needs to receive votes from veBAL holders. Additionally, several other layers exist where emissions can be placed to a gauge such as:
- vlAURA votes from AURA finance
- Direct Incentives on Balancer Gauges
- Direct incentives on AURA Finance Gauges
- Voting incentive Markets
Points 2 and 4 are explained in more detail further below.
Placing Direct Incentives
It is possible to stream direct incentives to Balancer staking gauges. Several options exist. Consult our direct incentives docs for more details.
Voting Incentive Markets
Balancer v2's tokenomics around veBAL encourage partaking in various voting incentive markets to attract BAL token rewards to certain gauges. These voting markets are operated by independent entities and leveraging these markets is absolutely not mandatory. The core pool framework guarantees that a fraction of protocol fees are distributed on voting markets without any further action from a partner. There are, of course, also other methods on how to participate, please consult the voting market section for more details.