The price of DeFi protocol Balancer’s governance token surges over 200% on first trading day

Balancer, an Ethereum-based automated market maker exchange protocol, has officially deployed its governance tokens on the Ethereum mainnet.

Announcing the news on Tuesday, the Balancer team said almost 1,000 Ethereum addresses would receive the governance token BAL today, and a total of 35,435,000 BAL has been minted as of Tuesday. Soon after the deployment, the tokens also started trading on Balancer's own exchange platform and decentralized exchange Uniswap, rising from $7 to as high as $22 at one point during the day. 

THE SCOOP

Keep up with the latest news, trends, charts and views on crypto and DeFi with a new biweekly newsletter from The Block's Frank Chaparro

By signing-up you agree to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy
By signing-up you agree to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy

Balancer launched its liquidity mining program on June 1, allowing liquidity providers on the platform to start earning BAL by supplying tokens to the protocol. At the time, the team made note that users would not actually receive their BAL until a few weeks later, as it was still working out the last details of the deployment of BAL smart contracts.

Over the 3 weeks since launch, a total of 435,000 BAL has been allocated, and in the future, 145,000 BAL will be issued every week to liquidity providers. Overall, up to 65 million tokens will end up at the hands of liquidity providers, with the Balancer team and investors holding 25 million, and an additional 10 million to grow the Balancer ecosystem and future fundraising.

About Author

Celia joined The Block as a reporter after earning her BA in the History of Science from the University of Chicago. Having spent years pondering over why 2+2 cannot equal 5, she is interested in the history and philosophy of mathematics, computation, and cryptography. She also had a very brief stint at Crunchbase News.