Balancer to Deploy on Polkadot’s Parachain Moonbeam

According to the company’s announcement, the integration is part of the Balancer Labs grant program. The DEX has been funding development projects exploring experimental deployments of Balancer to alternative Layer 1 protocols.

Jeremy Musighi, the head of growth at Balancer Labs, said the integration provides the company with the opportunity to explore how its protocol can benefit from the unique trade-offs offered by Polkadot.

Creating Balancer on Moonbeam will enable the protocol to leverage Moonbeam’s underlying infrastructure, including Substrate-based parachain implementation, collators, and the Polkadot relay chain. And while this simplifies the implementation, as compared to a native parachain-based implementation, the company said it doesn’t preclude deploying Balancer as a standalone parachain in the future.

With over $1.6 billion in total value locked (TVL), Balancer is one of the leading DeFi protocols on the market. The rising gas costs on Ethereum have pushed many DeFi projects to seek alternative blockchains offering lower fees and better scalability. Moonbeam’s Ethereum compatibility has already made it one of the most popular Polkadot parachains, with projects such as SushiSwap porting their platform to Moonbeam.

Parity, the development team behind Polkadot, is set to lead Balancer’s initial porting with Moonbeam’s support. After the initial bootstrapping process, Moonbeam said it wants to hire a team of external developers interested in maintaining Balancer on Moonbeam. The company said the team will be supported with grants from both Balancer, providing $10,000 worth of BAL tokens, and Moonbeam allocating 10,000 GLMR tokens.