Hello all! As Balancer grows, it becomes increasingly difficult to know everything that is going on, and these updates will serve to bridge that information gap and keep the community informed. As always, feel free to ask questions here or in Discord!
Smart Contract & Integrations
Building and Building on, a secure & flexible protocol
Stable Pools + Meta Pools
Stable Pools
Stable pools have launched! Similar to Curve, this is a new pool type for similar price assets. It aims to create less price impact for traders, increase trading volume and provide higher APY for LPs. Balancer is the first AMM to feature multiple pricing algorithms!
Status: The StaBAL3 pool is live and is currently Balancer’s highest liquidity pool (>$100m) with 24h volume in the millions! The BTC one is live too with some preliminary liquidity, and the staBAL3-EUR is also deployed, just waiting to be seeded with liquidity.
Meta Stable Pools
Meta Stable Pools are ideal for highly correlated (but not necessarily hard-pegged) tokens. One of the most powerful features of Meta Stable Pools is that they can hold Pool Tokens and facilitate easy swaps between tokens in the underlying pools. Some example pools and their use cases are:
- {Balancer USD Stable Pool BPT & Balancer EUR Stable Pool BPT}
- Easily swap between underlying pool tokens
- DAI and EURS
- PAR and USDC
- etc
- Easily swap between underlying pool tokens
- {Balancer USD Stable Pool BPT & NewUsdToken}
- Swap between any of the underlying stablecoins (DAI, USDC, USDT) and NewUsdToken
- {DAI & cDAI}
- Swap directly between correlated tokens
Status: In development
Sidechains & L2
Retail traction on L2 is picking up across the industry. Near-zero fees make hopping across multiple pools more feasible at scale. Users can invest in a larger variety of pools without creating fragmentation risk.
Status:
- Polygon Launched!
- Arbitrum: Balancer received access to the closed Beta
- Outstanding tasks include: Multisig, Contracts, UI
- No firm launch date has been provided by the Arbitrum team
Staking Contracts
Claiming LP rewards is currently a clunky experience. With Staking Contracts, LP rewards can be calculated in real-time. This opens up interesting possibilities for LP rewards such as: auto-staking, one-click claim & reinvest, and external airdrops to Balancer Pools.
Status: In Development
Liquidity Bootstrapping Pools
LBPs are being ported to V2! Kovan deployment is live, and partners are creating their UIs.
Status: Targeting launch in 1 month if reviews go well and UI teams don’t have unexpected issues
Investment Pools
Investment Pools are Weighted Pools with granular configurability, elegant rebalancing, and extra safety features. These pools are being designed to have many new features like higher token count, native rebalancing, novel fee structures, and token management. Investment Pools will grow Balancer’s index fund offerings, and will provide new, attractive pools to LPs and bring even deeper liquidity for traders.
Status: In Development
Asset Manager Pools
These are pools that lend a percentage of their assets to another DeFi protocol, which increases LP returns. Balancer is the first protocol to achieve this without radically increasing gas costs - there is zero swap overhead! Asset Managers in conjunction with Stable Pools will have a huge impact, for example Curve’s 3pool has 100m+ of unused assets which could start to earn yield!
Status: Launch TBD, we have decided to extend the design so that it is flexible enough to allow for integration with multiple lending & DeFi platforms which will offer much higher impact in terms of APY than the current design.
Front-end & Design
Making the Balancer protocol easy to use
Dark Mode!
Launched and is absolutely awesome 
Note, there are a few small remaining items to resolve that are stuck in light mode.
EIP-3085
Switching networks is way easy now. MetaMask (etc) now prompts users to switch to the correct network. More on EIP-3085
Gnosis Solver
This integration will use the Gnosis Solver (CowSwap) for the trade interface. The goal is to offer lower fees to improve the trading experience. This is a major endeavor.
Status: Preview Screen is coming soon. Should be ready for preliminary testing on the order of weeks
Ecosystem Team
Creating an enduring Ecosystem
Community
Goal: Increase engagement
- Improve Communication
- Regular updates on BLabs Initiatives
- Monthly Technical AMAs & Community Halls with Fernando
- Clear Governance Process launched
- Improve Breadth
- APAC engagement: Longhash applying for a grant
- Look into improving Balancer.fi translation
- Improve Depth (Ballers)
- Ballers continue to provide strong community engagement
Partnerships
Goal: Discover new and interesting use cases
- 80/20 Pools - Investors are aligned with the vision; will ask them to start helping to spread awareness
- Gnosis Auctions - searching for a first project to implement LM incentives
Grants
Goal: Grow the Balancer Ecosystem
- Grant Committee
- Luuk interviewing candidates for program lead (soft yes)
- Proposal pending
- Spectre grant finalized
- Copper Launch grant finalized
- All pending grant teams have been engaged:
- China community development (LHV)
- Liquidity pools pairing securities + crypto (verified.network)
- Symphony Finance - yield generating limit orders on Balancer
- Waiting for technical input from committee
Marketing
Goal: Improve the awareness of Balancer’s brand
- Product & Partnership Marketing is going well - up next is Meta Stable Pools announcement.
- ETHCC in Paris is upcoming. Jeremy and Fernando both to speak.
- ROI mechanism and analytics are being put in place so that all marketing efforts can be measured.
- Balancer Brand - we will be engaging with a branding agency to enhance and further define Balancer’s brand.
