For the last few days, I've been learning about all things Uniswap, Ethereum and WHIVE. Today I decided to branch out and broaden my horizons to Balancer. The post from @khaleelkazi yesterday with his video explainer saw some mentions of Balancer in the comments. I started reading up on it and was quickly fascinated by their platform.

_{Todays "Liquidity" image from [Pixabay](https://pixabay.com/photos/water-drop-of-water-macro-drip-1882395/)}

First a look at the last 24 Hours for WHIVE.

No new actions of interest from me.
The total amount of WHIVE added to pools increased to nearly $10,000 worth.
Some transactions happened.

Strangely, my personal "fees earned" tally decreased. I have no idea why, I thought this was a cumulative tally, but despite the pools being used for transfers, somehow my fees decreased. WTF??? Maybe my understanding of cumulative is wrong, perhaps that"cumulative" total is for all pools, in the last day, not all pools all time as I thought. Anyway, If that is the case and I am earning $0.08 - $0.11 per day total, Then thats not too bad. Todays (if that is right) income for me was $0.0896 which based on my liquidity provided works out at an annualized 9.4% return.

Now, on to Balancer.

After reading the comments about Balancer on other posts, I started digging to learn more. It's more foreign land for me, so I start with a google search along the lines of "what is balancer" or something like that.

One of the first things I came across was this fantastic explainer video from Boxmining on Youtube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHl_K-mceRo

After some other reading and research, I have decided to dip my toe in this platform and try it out.

Here is what i like so far:

The Pool creating allows for many more variations than Uniswap. Pools can have multiple tokens (up to 8) and percentage shares. For example, a Liquidity pool could have 20% WETH and 80% WBTC. A pool can be constructed to contain some of the hottest DeFi tokens in one place, or whatever. The portfolio management options this provides are amazing. Pools also have custom fee settings.
Fee income from providing liquidity, similar to Uniswap.
A native token - BAL - that is distributed to all Liquidity providers. Enter Yield farming.
A nice UI and in my opinion a much clearer site. In my limited experience so far, Uniswap has felt quite clunky and hard to navigate. As soon as I started playing around on Balancer I felt a lot more "at home" if that makes sense. It just felt a lot more "me". Can't really pinpoint why, but it just seemed a lot more clean and professional.

So what did I do?

Started of by buying more ETH with fiat. This will be my last fiat - crypto purchase for a little while.
Linked my Metamask to the Balancer platform - This was a one time event but cost a whopping $16 in GAS. Ouch.
Had to swap some of the ETH into WETH - more gas - this time $1.19 on a $60 ETH wrapping event.
Approve WETH spending on Balancer - more gas - this time $1.06
Deposited my 0.15 WETH into the biggest pool on Balancer, a 20% WETH, 80% BAL pool - More gas, this time $3.13.

What did I learn?

GAS sucks. I miss HIVE with its fast and free transaction. But ETH is an interesting place to play around, and a big chunk of the fees I'm currently paying are "one time only" in nature.

Biggest lesson's here are that you can deposit one single token into a multi-token pool, without needing to have the other tokens in the pool. I deposited 0.15 WETH in, and this was balanced automatically to be 0.0307 WETH and 1.524 BAL. I find that to be an incredible draw-card.

The ability to do this seems fantastic. In one transaction costing $3 in gas (beyond the one time fees to set up), you could put 1 coin into a pool that is made up of 8 coins, and instantly own a diversified portfolio of 8 different assets, all contained in one decentralized place earning transaction fees and BAL tokens - WOW, mind blown.

Back to WHIVE.

I really, really think that those of us interested in the WHIVE experiment should seriously work towards adding it to the Balancer platform. I am hooked and think it is one of the best platforms I have come across in crypto-land. Granted, my experience of it is only a few hours, but I am seriously impressed. Even having WHIVE in small proportions in pools with major coins will improve the liquidity of WHIVE and put HIVE on the map in a dynamic marketplace.

The other point is that getting WHIVE listed on @coingecko should become a priority. In order to earn BAL, the token must be listed on Coingecko and have at least 2 active marketplaces. Now Balancer is a market, and Uniswap is a market. Here is the link to list a token on Coingecko. I would assume that @fbslo would need to do this, as the person with the best knowledge of WHIVE. Thats just a guess though.

_{{Source - balancer website](https://balancer.finance/)}

DYOR

Everything I am writing about over the last few days is purely my own experiences and journey down the ETH DeFi rabbit hole. None of it is financial advice in any way, please do your own research.

Links.

Thanks for reading, and to those following my journey, commenting and sharing my tweets - thank you very much.

Cheers,

JK.

Posted Using LeoFinance

New experiences, branching out - Balancer looks awesome.