Balancer – a programmable liquidty and asset management protocol – has announced a bridge to NEAR protocol, a scalable Ethereum alternative.
NEAR Ethereum
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@BalancerLabs https://t.co/hPAyyOgkS6
— NEAR (@NEARProtocol) October 26, 2020
Balancer is the latest of many decentralized applications (DApps) to migrate or expand onto NEAR and other Layer one solutions, namely due to cheaper gas fees and low latency.
The Balancer team have expressed that they will stay primarily focused on the Ethereum implementation of their protocol, however Balancer Head of Growth Jeremy Musighi says that working with NEAR will give a profound glimpse into how the DApp will perform with higher scalability.
1/ Important to start by clearing up that we are 100% focused on building on Ethereum. There have been a few small grants for 3rd parties to implement the protocol on other L1s. But that is purely research for now, all of our internal efforts remain on Ethereum
— Mike McDonald (@mikeraymcdonald) October 27, 2020
Pushing development with grants
Balancer and NEAR are offering two grants worth up to $10,000 to incentivize the development of a Balancer front-end for NEAR, as well as an integration of Balancer into the NEAR wallet. The incentive will likely drive faster adoption and usability of the NEAR iteration of Balancer, allowing for improved accessibility and user experience. Rewards will be paid in NEAR and BAL tokens.
The partnership signals a growing interest in DeFi on blockchains outside of Ethereum, with Balancer offering a key olive branch to show that scalability can exist on other L1 solutions while remaining ETH focused.
About Balancer
Balancer has served as a popular automated market maker (AMM) throughout the 2020 DeFi boom. It provides unique liquidity pools that can contain several assets rather than just two, which is standard for most other AMM pools (on exchanges such as Uniswap). The pools can also be programmed via smart contracts, enabling the implementation of custom rules and strategies.
Balancer currently holds $307M in total value locked, good for 11th on the DeFi Pulse leaderboard. Its TVL peaked on September 1 of this year, at over $1.5 billion following the launch of the BAL governance token.
About NEAR Protocol
NEAR protocol launched its unrestricted mainnet this month, aiming to provide an alternative to Ethereum and its soaring gas fees.
NEAR has made a focused effort on making it easy to onboard Ethereum-based DApps through native EVM support and their “Rainbow” bridge, which connects the Ethereum and NEAR blockchains using a low-trust mechanism.
To stay up with both projects, follow Balancer and NEAR on Twitter.
Alejandro is a New-Zealand based trader and writer who has been involved in the cryptocurrency and blockchain space since early 2016. Being extremely passionate about this emerging technology, he has written content for a myriad of projects and news outlets.
