Event Timeline
About Balancer
Balancer is an automated market maker that lets a pool hold up to eight assets at weights the creator chooses, rather than the fixed fifty fifty split most AMMs of the period used. A pool could be weighted 80/20 or 98/2, which made it usable as a self rebalancing portfolio as well as a trading venue.
The protocol went live in March 2020 and ran for three months with no token. When BAL launched on 23 June 2020 it came with a retroactive allocation for the liquidity providers who had supplied those first months, alongside the ongoing liquidity mining programme that ran from the same day.
Airdrop Stats
How it worked to get the Balancer airdrop
Supply liquidity to a Balancer pool
Deposits made between the March 2020 launch and the June token event formed the retroactive allocation. No announcement preceded it.
Choose a pool with real volume
Allocations followed the liquidity actually used for trading, so pools that saw flow counted for more than idle deposits.
Stay through to the token event
The retroactive portion read the months before 23 June 2020, so withdrawing early reduced what a wallet received.
Continue into liquidity mining
Weekly BAL emissions began at the same event and ran for years after, so the retroactive drop was the start of the distribution rather than all of it.
Was the Balancer airdrop worth it?
- Three months of unannounced eligibility. The protocol ran from March to June 2020 with no token and no indication one was coming, so the wallets that qualified were there because weighted pools were useful to them.
- The retroactive portion was the smaller half. 435,000 BAL went out retroactively, but weekly emissions of 145,000 BAL continued afterwards. Anyone who kept liquidity in place earned considerably more over the following year than the initial drop was worth.
- Weighted pools were genuinely new. Balancer was not a Uniswap fork. Arbitrary pool weights let a position behave like a rebalancing index fund, which is why the liquidity arrived before any incentive existed.
Balancer Official Links
Official channels, documentation and community for this airdrop:
This airdrop has concluded. It is kept for research rather than participation.
