Qi DAO: Fireside Chat with Davis Ramsey of Balancer
If you’ve been in DeFi for a bit, you may have heard of Davis Ramsey and have definitely heard of Balancer. This week he sat down with the folks at the Qi DAO for their fireside chat to discuss Balancer, a new partnership, and more.
What is Balancer?
Balancer’s protocol is like an index fund that you get to set up yourself that is constantly getting rebalanced to your settings.
You set up the pool and then gain fees as it rebalances. With Balancer you can have up to 8 tokens with different weightings and fees for your tokens. Soon with Balancer anyone will be able to make a customizable pool with any tokens/fee structure they want. There will also be asset management for loaning out tokens in the future to earn you even more yield on your passive tokens.
New Balancer pools coming to Polygon
Balancer will soon be introducing a new stablecoin pool on Polygon that will be incentivized that includes USDT/USDC/DAI, along with Qi DAO’s stablecoin MAI. Balancer chose MAI due to its traction and to include a token that isn’t included on ETH. Balancer is incentivizing the stablecoin pool with their native token BAL.
Along with this stablecoin pool, Balancer will also be incentivizing a
Qi/MAI/MATIC/USDC/BAL.
Other pools will be coming to Polygon as well. You can see the new proposed pools here.
Polygon, Balancer, and near-zero fee trades
Davis mentioned his excitement about Polygon and its low gas fees. With near-zero fees to make a trade unique experimentation for pools becomes possible. An eight-token pool is hard to make when gas fees are too high!
One of Balancer’s goals is to lower gas fees for traders on Ethereum and Polygon definitely makes that possible.
Pools, incentives, how Balancer chooses assets
Another long-term goal Balancer’s is to hand the protocol over to the community. A goal that the Qi DAO seems to heartily agree with as they use their Qi governance token to vote on proposals!
This emphasis on community decision-making is reflected in Balancers recognition of “Ballers” (distinguished community members known for their contribution to the protocol) who vote on new pools, assets, and rewards for those. Davis doesn’t work for Balancer, but gets to help make decisions about the protocol with the help of community input. This skilled input is especially important when putting together an index of assets: if one goes to zero the index will fail.
When looking at whether to incentivize a project and include it as an asset Balancer loves to see a good community, long-term focus, and new work happening. He mentioned he has seen that happening as he’s been part of the Qi DAO Discord (and over at Adamant Vaults as well.)
What are the incentives that are coming to Polygon?
- 25,000 BAL per week from Balancer
- 375,000 MATIC per week from Polygon
- 15,000 Qi per week has also been committed by the Qi DAO has committed for the two pools that they will be part of
That’s a ton of incentive! You can get into things by trading for some BAL, Qi, MAI and the other assets you’d like to pool.
When will Balancer be launched on Polygon?
Announcements of the pools will come at the end of the week, but the incentivized pools start Monday, June 28!
Join Balancer’s Discord to get in before most everyone else: the link will be posted there before any major announcements.
Thoughts on the Qi DAO
Davis mentioned his encouragement when looking into Qi DAO and its protocol, and the importance of a native stablecoin like MAI. As well, he mentioned some interesting new mechanics when imaging BAL as a collateral for MAI, or looking at Qi DAO’s new camTokens.
You can learn more about Balancer from Davis at his substack “The Balancer Report”. Follow him on Twitter as well.
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