Balancer Distributes BAL Governance Tokens to Yield Farmers

Balancer – an automated asset management and liquidity protocol – has begun to distribute its coveted BAL governance tokens to liquidity providers.

BAL is live!

The 435k BAL for liquidity providers of the first three weeks of liquidity mining (145k per week) have just been sent out to the wallets used to provide liquidity on Balancer.https://t.co/pkXFzwzPVC

— Balancer Labs (@BalancerLabs) June 23, 2020

For those who missed it, Balancer’s Liquidity Mining program has been live for 3 weeks, giving those who provide liquidity to Balancer pools a pro-rata share on 145,000 BAL allocated each week.

Fernando Martinelli – the CEO of Balancer – added some color to this strategy adding:

“In the revolution of decentralization and trustlessness allowed by Ethereum, protocols only have upside in distributing their own tokens (governance or work) to their users. They get a community with skin in the game that will fight for constantly improving the protocol. It’s also theirs now.”

In the case of BAL, tokens represent governance rights over the growing asset management protocol set to launch in the coming weeks. While Balancer had initially considered off-the-shelf solutions like Aragon, the project is instead opting to create a customized on-chain governance system.

Now, less than 24 hours after launch, 435,000 BAL from the first three weeks of liquidity mining have been distributed to over 1000 Balancer Yield Farmers.

Here’s what you need to know.

BAL Token Distribution

BAL has a total supply of 100,000,000 tokens. Out of that 100M, just over 35.4M have been minted and are being distributed as follows:

• • 22.5M for the founding team, stock options, advisors and investors.
  • 2.5M for future employee stock options
  • 5M for the Balancer Ecosystem Fund used to stimulate growth as BAL holders see fit.
  • 5M for the Fundraising Fund used to seed Balancer Lab’s future funding rounds.
  • 0.435M allocated to Liquidity Miners

Of the 22.5M tokens issued to the team, 5.65M (or 25%) is currently unlocked with the remaining 16.875M (or 75%) being subject to a three year vesting period.

What the interesting thing to note here is that of the 35.4M which have currently been minted, very few of them are actually trading on the open market – hence the rapid fluctuation on the price of BAL

What’s more is that with 65% of the supply set to be introduced through Liquidity Mining, only 1.74M BAL is set to enter circulation each year.

Where to Get BAL

The best place to trade BAL is on the Balancer Exchange. If you are a BAL holder, there are numerous liquidity pools popping up to supply BAL to.

BAL is currently live on CoinGecko and DeFiMarketCap, giving traders an easy way to keep up with the rapidly changing price of the scare new governance token.

Outside of speculation, the surest way to get BAL is to earn it through yield farming. Here’s a great tool to identify which pools are earning the most BAL at any given time.

Liquidity Mining Surges

Just last week, Compound kicked off the latest trend of DeFi liquidity mining with their COMP distribution. Now, just 8 days later, Balancer is further solidifying the hottest new trend as BAL responds very favorably among DeFi token enthusiasts.

“Imagine if Apple could have distributed voting shares to early Mac users: you would probably have seen a totally different story than Apple almost going bankrupt. This was just not possible (for legal and technical reasons) before Ethereum came to life.” added Martinelli.

For reference, BAL was suggested to have a seed round price of $0.60/token. Less than 2 hours after launch, BAL is continually breaking new ATHs of upwards of $18/token. What this goes to show is that underpinning the premise of owning the very products you use is an increasingly hot appetite for those early to the trend.

For those keeping a close eye on things, be on the lookout for BalancerV2 in the coming weeks. With the advent of governance and numerous other mechanisms to drive adoption, things are looking quite well for the rising asset management protocol.

To stay up on Balancer, follow them on Twitter or join the conversation on Discord.