Decentralized automated market maker Balancer has locked down investments from the institutional cryptocurrency venture firms Pantera Capital and Alameda Research in order to develop a second version of the protocol.
The Balancer Labs DeFi protocol allows anyone to create or add liquidity to customizable pools and earn trading fees. It’s just had a fresh injection of funds through two huge investment firms that have purchased stashes of native BAL tokens from the Balancer Labs treasury.
The announcement added that the new funding will help grow the Balancer Labs team as the development of Balancer V2 ramps up. The V2 iteration will overhaul the current system to introduce improvements to transaction costs, ease developer integration, and expand the user experience.
Reaction from Balancer Higher-Ups
CEO of Balancer Labs Fernando Martinelli stated that the partnership was aligned in their vision for building programmable liquidity to power the new financial system.
Joey Krug, Co-CIO of Pantera Capital, added that Balancer’s creation of financial primitives that were not previously possible is one of the most exciting aspects of DeFi;
“The magic of Balancer is that its smart pools provide value to all parts of the liquidity ecosystem — as a self-balancing portfolio for asset owners, a deep liquidity source for traders, and a bootstrapping tool for issuers.”
Meanwhile, Alameda Research boss Sam Bankman-Fried, who has become a bit of an industry superstar lately, stated that Balancer
“The future of the space depends on its ability to scale and to grow; much has been written about scaling but surprisingly little about product growth, which in the end is just as important.”
The number of tokens purchased and their purchase prices were not disclosed, sparking the odd question from those commenting on the announcement.
Tokens Get to Pumping
As expected the news has been a big driver of BAL prices over the past few hours as the token pumped from an intraday low of $10.11 to $11.36 at the time of press.
The 10% surge has maintained the momentum for BAL this month as it has gained over 30% since its November low of $8.76. However, like most of its DeFi brethren, the token is still way down from its all-time high with an almost 70% loss since it topped $35 on Sept 1.
TVL in the protocol is also down from over $1.5 billion on the same day as the token peak, to just $270 million today.
