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Balancer has become the latest entrant into Near’s smart contract platform and a great ecosystem of protocols and projects. Near is a competitor of Ethereum that just had an unrestricted mainnet launch a week ago and the team is ensuring that all the protocols functioning on it have the best in class applications.
Near’s smart contract platform makes it easier for DApps to migrate or move between chains. The prime difference between Near and Ethereum is that Near is hell-bent and focused on achieving both usability and performance which is important to back real-world applications with a low latency rate, lower gas fees, and added amounts of flexibility.
Balancer is a protocol meant for programmable liquidity which has become a key component in Decentralized finance applications. The platform is known to provide financial building blocks that enable anyone to easily create DeFi products and services which is not possible in the traditional financial systems of the world. The Balancer pools are automated market makers that second as self-balancing weighted portfolios and price sensors. This goes a long way in ensuring that different decentralized solutions like fair and transparent token distribution or trustless exchange of assets and even smart treasury management happens with finesse and ease.
The Native EVM support and its Rainbow bridge are the two biggest reasons for Ethereum applications to leverage the cost and speed benefits of Near without the need to rework on their code base or even forgo their existing user base. This is why building Balancer on Near will just take a few months rather than years. Another major factor for this move is the ever-increasing and unaffordable gas fees on Ethereum. This is not only financially burdensome but also poses technical challenges for DeFi projects. The small Balancer liquidity pools were finding it extremely difficult to be profitable owing to the high gas fees. The higher gas fees prevent arbitrage efficiency of the highest level because it needs cheaper and faster execution of transactions across the markets.
Thanks to its Near Bridge, now users of Balancer protocol will be able to port their ETH assets to Near and even back if at all they decide to take advantage of the transaction fees and scalability on the Near platform. This will lead to more opportunities for Balancer for DeFi innovation.
Jeremy Musighi, Head of Growth at Balancer Labs talked about the community-driven growth of their platform and also why Balancer’s association with Near is as exciting as a rational move:
“We’re excited to partner with the NEAR team in co-funding the development of Balancer on the NEAR protocol. While the Balancer Labs team remains focused on Ethereum-based development of the Balancer protocol, we welcome the opportunity to support building on-chain liquidity on NEAR, while observing and learning from how Balancer’s technology performs when paired with the lower gas fees and low latency that the NEAR protocol offers.”