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Ecosystem Highlight: Balanced Network
Recorded: May 21, 2025 Duration: 0:36:48Space Recording
Short Summary
Balanced is set to enhance its DeFi offerings with the launch of BNUSD, a new stablecoin, while participating in the Stellar Community Fund to accelerate integration efforts. The upcoming user acquisition pilot program, featuring a $21,000 prize pool, aims to engage users and promote the platform's innovative cross-chain capabilities.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Good morning everyone.
I believe I have Elsie on stage with me.
We're working on getting Arosh up.
Elsie, are you there?
Oh good, Arosh is up too.
Can you all go ahead and unmute and say hello?
Hey Lindsay.
Hey, there you go.
How's it going?
I'm good, I'm good.
Hope you're keeping well.
It's quite early for me.
I'm actually in Mexico City this week,
so I didn't realize that this is at 7am my timem my time oh well i'm sure coffee will do the job yeah exactly uh where are you tuning in from
well i'm based in sri lanka so uh yeah yes and what time is it there uh it's half six in the evening, so probably 12 hours ahead of you. My day is almost
over. Lucky you. And we have Elsie here too. Elsie, do you want to say hi? Hi, can you hear me?
Yep, can you hear you now? Hi, I'm dialing in from Korea, so it's around 10 p.m. my time.
Good morning, Lindsay.
This is quite a global coalition we have going on at the moment.
Indeed.
We also have Algomancer from our team.
So Algomancer is Alex.
He's the dev mastermind who can talk about the tech behind our products.
Awesome.
I invited him up into the space as well, so hopefully he can chat too.
I'm excited.
Speaking of the product, I was going to say I'm excited to actually get started.
Do you all want to walk through real quick what Balanced does and who you are and just give a quick intro to the audience?
loan product that allows stellar users as well as users on 12 different chains across both EVM
and non-EVM chains like Sui, Solana, a couple of Cosmos chains and more to use their native assets
from their respective chains to take out loans in a stablecoin called BNUSD
or to use the DEX to swap out their native asset
to any other native asset on other chains.
So it's like a DeFi product that is built
for native cross-chain experiences.
Gotcha. And we're going to dig in a little bit more to what that actually means on the user side,
just because I am someone who's kind of learning DeFi as a result of my job.
And so I'm always interested in hearing, you know, how protocols wind up acquiring users,
what the end goal is to be able to provide users and all of that.
But before we do that, I would love to start with why you chose to integrate with Stellar.
I know Balanced is a cross-chain product.
We'll talk a little bit about what you do on Stellar and then what you do as a whole on other chains. So if you could just start with what made Stellar an attractive blockchain to integrate with and how did it enhance the product and toolings that Balance already offered?
Right. So we were actually part of the Stellar Community Fund cohort. So getting funding to
build on Stellar was definitely a huge enabler
that allowed us to accelerate our integration efforts with the Stellar blockchain.
And aside from that, we're also partaking in the user acquisition pilot program
pilot program that starts next week, which we are super excited about. So this was organized
that starts next week, which we are super excited about.
by the Stellar Foundation to help applications like ourselves go to market and target Stellar
DeFi users or XLM holders. So there's just been a lot of support in the ecosystem and also because we are a DeFi product
we were attracted to Steller's history
of kind of like offering a lot of like on off ramp tools
for users to onboard to crypto.
Alex, is there some more that you wanted to add to that from a technical perspective?
No, I think you said it all, actually.
Awesome.
Yeah, in technical perspective, Stellar is a really great chain to build on. You said it all, actually. Awesome. Yeah.
In technical perspective, Stellar is a really great chain to build on.
I'm actually discovering, I've been discovering Stellar a few weeks ago when starting building our tech on it.
And yeah, nothing to add.
Everything just really great here.
Well, that's really good to hear and very, very fun for me.
Can you walk through what the process was like for you to be in the Stellar Community Fund and the support you received with that and what that was like for you?
Yeah, so actually the product manager that applied for the Stellar Community Fund in the beginning is not with us here today.
But I was very much part of the process as well.
So I can very much attest to how structured it was, which was great because at every stage we knew exactly what we had to do.
In the beginning, we set out an entire plan with the full budget of what we would need
in order to do integration steps like one through seven.
and then we had that proposal approved then we kind of just basically kind of built according
And then we had that proposal approved.
to the original proposal step by step and we received funding in trenches as well so we could
yeah we could kind of build as we go and also in parallel get funding as we go.
So it was overall a very good process.
It helped us get closer with the Stellar Foundation team as well.
So it was a good way to sort of ramp up in the ecosystem.
Yeah, I'm so glad to hear that. I was going to say I wanted to walk through that a little bit early on because I want to dive into the tools and
products that you actually have. And let's talk about the multi-chain strategy that you all
have implemented. You operate across 10 plus blockchains. Why was it important for you to
take a multi-chain approach? And what
challenges did you face in deciding to do that? Yeah, so we come from a layer one background,
where from the very beginning, our org mission basically was interoperability. So making user experiences between chains as seamless as possible.
So we've been spending a lot of years building out this infrastructure, cross-chain infrastructure,
which early last year, we decided to pivot entirely for DeFi. So we're completely focused on enabling various cross-chain DeFi
user experiences in the most seamless way possible. So I guess like, yeah, I would say that
our company mission has always been interoperability. And yeah, we're just building in alignment with that.
Well, that goes to one of the key features of Balanced,
which is enabling cross-chain swaps within 60 seconds.
How did you create that experience?
Maybe Alex, I think maybe you can answer that a little bit
from the tech perspective and why is that important to users?
from the tech perspective.
And why is that important to users?
Yeah, so, you know, question swaps was not invented, like, it was invented a while ago,
but it's always been a nightmare to do so because you have to find some bridges,
you have to wait a lot of time for your funds to go from a chain to another,
or the fastest way possible was using
centralized exchange that was the almost the only viable way to use um what what we did with with
balanced um is that we created a solver uh crushing solver which is which basically just
finds the best the best path to swap a token for another and just give you the token on that chain
before we actually make the action. Meaning that if you have to wait like 15 minutes to bridge
from a blockchain to Stellar, for example, we will give you your token on Stellar and we will
make the bridge in the background after we gave you your funds. So basically, as a user, you are doing a swap,
and you get your funds almost instantly,
in most of the time less than 60 seconds.
Yeah.
So that's a really, really important feature in terms
of user experience, to be able to swap any token from any chain to another without the need to wait for hours
and having to go through a centralized exchange.
That makes sense.
What are your kind of risk mitigation tactics with that?
Because if you're the one that is supporting basically the swap before it actually happens,
how do you make sure that then on the back end
of the swap actually goes through
to basically keep kind of the accounting the same?
What does that look like?
That's a good question actually.
So yeah, we basically take some risk to do so,
but we have a bunch of risk mitigation techniques
that I cannot really tell here
because it's part of how solver work
and part of secret technology.
But yeah, we have a bunch of risk mitigation.
We are basically able to see how dangerous is that swap for us in terms of price changing and stuff like this.
So we just adapt.
Solvers sometimes have some bad swaps, meaning that they give to the user more funds that they can have.
But, you know, it's like a trading strategy.
You have good trades, you have bad trades. The most important thing is to have more good trades
than bad trades. And for the user perspective, there is almost no risk because the user will
have the fund that we told him he has. Even though if we cannot rebalance properly, the user will have the phone that we told him he has. Even though if we cannot rebalance properly, the user will have the phone.
So that's the most important thing.
Gotcha.
Okay.
Yeah, I get that.
Proprietary technology questions.
That's my bad.
I was switching gears a little bit.
I would love for one of you to walk us through balancears, why you chose to use stablecoins a lot in what
you do and a lot in what you encourage your ecosystem to do, and just how those work from
a user perspective.
Sorry.
So, Arosh, do you want to give it a go oh yeah i mean uh yeah i was yeah sure sure i
mean um well your question of um um stablecoin so so the stable coins um that uh that's on balance
is called bnusd's balance dollars um it's um just a bit of background on BNUSD. It's a crypto-backed and tokenized
collateral assets. So it's backed by dollars, but it's pretty much, we have tokenized assets in
terms of treasury assets, US treasury assets, and also crypto assets. So it's pretty much the value is back to something called a stability fund.
So it's it's essentially
collateralized crypto and tokenized assets in an app share.
So our main main ways is basically using BNUSD as a vehicle to natively transfer value across all the chains we're connected to.
So we're connected to 12 chains at the moment and across seven tech stacks.
So BNUSD essentially is a vehicle that we use to transfer value and maintain the value
because as you know, crypto is a highly volatile asset and BNUSD gives us an easy way and our
users to transfer value seamlessly and in a less volatile way.
So yeah.
Gotcha.
And what is the user benefit to using BNUSD? I mean,
you got into it a little bit, but since you support 12 chains,
being able to quickly move across chains seems like one,
but why else would people want to use the balance dollar as opposed to,
or why did you, I guess,
choose to build your own rather than using an existing stablecoin?
Yeah, so on the point of use cases of
BNUSD, so the balance savings rate product where you can deposit
BNUSD in any form.
So if you want to deposit in on Stellar, you can do so you can you can
deposit up to 18 assets that we that we support, you can deposit and maybe in USD and you can
directly deposit in the savings rate it's and you can take it out whenever you want.
The rate is a pretty,
I think it's going around like 11, 12%.
Yeah. To add to that a little bit.
Yeah. So in addition to the fungibility of BNUSD
across 13 different chains,
and it being like a good storage of value,
it being a stable coin.
Compared to other stable coins,
it's also, we have to remember that it's a CDP style,
it's an over collateralized stable coin
backed by native assets across these 13 chains.
So from the user's perspective,
it allows them to leverage native assets that they already own, unlock some more value from that
in the form of BNUSD. So for Stellar users, for example, they could stake their XLM as collateral unbalanced and then get up to an LTV value,
LTV like 150% of loans in BNUSD and then use that BNUSD, swap it out to XLM or use BNUSD in various BNUSD use cases that we hopefully will be building out in the
coming months in the Stellar ecosystem. Gotcha. Okay. So it allows for, it sounds like it allows
for leverage trading a little bit. Am I getting that right? Yeah. Yeah. You could do whatever
you want with the BNUSD. You are already leveraging some of your assets by taking out the loan in the first place.
But then, yeah, you could do more leverage trading with your loan after that.
Okay, gotcha.
Well, and I actually want to use that to kind of segue into user benefits and user experience.
So could you walk me through why people are using Balanced
and what they're using it for? Yeah, I think mainly it is a lot of people use Balanced for
that loan functionality because it is a very flexible product. You can stake your SUI,
you can stake your XLN, you can stake Solana. Any of the native
tokens of the chains that we support are supported as collateral unbalanced. So whatever assets that
you own across those chains, mostly focusing on the native assets or the liquid staking token versions of those assets,
you can take out a loan using that. And in terms of like borrow rates as well,
we are very competitive compared to our competitor products. So users pay a 2% annual borrow fee for their loan, which is very, very low compared to much higher rates found for other loan products, usually like in the 8% to 10% region.
So it's very flexible in that way.
And another part of the balanced product is the DEX.
So this gets into the Intense and Solvers type of backend
that Alex was mentioning before
but using this DEX,
people can easily on off-ramp to the Stellar ecosystem
using assets that they already
own on any of the 13 chains that we're already on.
So perhaps you don't want,
you're already,
you've already staked your XLM in Aquarius decks,
for example,
but you want to participate in the upcoming user acquisition pilot program.
So you want to switch some of your like SUI holdings or your
Solana holdings into XLM to participate in this. You can basically do that one stop on balance.
Gotcha. Okay. So it sounds like a lot of basically, it sounds like a lot of what you
do for users is loans and then swapping.
Is that correct?
Yeah, like loans and then on-off ramp from other chains.
Gotcha.
Okay, cool.
And so we talked about this a little bit, and Alex, you went into kind of solvers and
other things, but is there any other like unique technical infrastructure you want to
point out that differentiates you from other DeFi products
or that you are particularly excited about within the build of balance? Like what makes your tech
special? So most of the cross-chain solution solvers or other stuff or using already existing bridge solutions and stuff like that,
which are expensive to use or slow. As a L1, we have created our own messaging system,
cross-chain messaging system, meaning that our own technology with our own relays make us able to send a message, data from any chain to another.
So that's what allows us to create
and to make non-expensive swaps cross chain.
So the solver is the technology that facilitates swaps,
that does it for the user,
but in the details,
the solver is using what we've built as a L1 years ago, also using our own bridge,
I would say, that we've built for our L1
to make that possible.
Gotcha, and that makes sense.
So it's, yeah, it's not just relying on other integrations,
it's actually your own messaging system
that allows for all this to happen,
which is unique. That makes total sense. Sorry, just wanted to, I mean, having our own tech
is really fun, really cool, right? But it has to be useful, you know? And the good part of that is that it cost us way less to do some
question actions so we are actually able to provide one of them chain swapping
so that that's that's what makes that also unique is that we provide almost every time best quotes than our competitors.
Gotcha.
Yeah.
And also to what Alex mentioned also, like, um, the, the solvers obviously
like, you know, continue improving and, uh, and also like the tech, uh, on the
solver is going to be, because like for Dexas at the end of the day, it's about
like liquidity and like how you manage your liquidity
if you don't have so much liquidity.
How do you best deploy that liquidity to the users
in the most efficient way possible?
And the solver, I guess, right now, maybe, as Ken mentioned,
also, they're making a lot of improvements in the next months
to come as well.
It will be much more efficient as well.
Yeah.
A perfect segue. I was going to ask what is on your roadmap for the next six to 12 months. So Alex,
you want to talk about how the tech is going to get better?
Yeah.
So mostly adding more chains, adding more DEXs, especially on Stellar.
The goal is to be able to tap into almost all the DEXs and all the chains, right?
So the more DEXs we implement, the best code we would be able to have for the user.
And apart from this, more-end stuff like better risk management
obviously um uh but also fastest uh fastest yeah uh uh intense uh solving and also
that's the that's the that's the war it's having better quotes every every time so
being able to rebalance at the cheaper cost
for the user and and stuff like this so better quotes more more indexes more blockchain especially
love that what about from the user perspective um lc or roach
i know we talked a little bit about um the balance dollar and some more use cases coming to that.
What's on the roadmap?
Yeah, so soon we'll be launching...
Oh, no, you muted.
Oh, sorry. Hey, can you still hear me?
Yeah, there we go.
You'll be launching.
Oh, yeah.
So, yeah, we'll be launching a more integrated product
that allows people to do more stuff natively cross-chain.
So right now it's focused mostly on the DEX
and then taking out a CTP-style loan.
Soon we'll be providing more options
like providing liquidity to LPs
or like a money market style type of lending services as well.
So there's a lot that we can yeah, that we can look forward to.
What types of people are you hoping to bring on board as the product grows? Like,
what types of users are you looking for? What do you want people to be doing with the product?
Yeah, so ultimately, we're building this product for the normie crowd. So it's a bit of a, yeah, so it's like a, it's a big goal, I think, because
in most cases, DeFi products are mostly used by what we call like DGENs, or at least people who
are already very familiar with crypto. But when we're building the product itself, our vision is always to target the everyday user to be a viable substitute for savings and loans products that you would find in traditional banking.
Gotcha. Okay. I was wondering about that because again, I'm learning DeFi alongside kind of
a lot of the world right now, actually, or at least a lot of people on crypto Twitter.
And so kind of like loan products and leverage products and stuff, there's an education gap
that's sort of still missing for people who are not as well-versed in maybe the trading world.
What do you see being like as a thing that could help change that? Like, how do we actually make
these types of behaviors or auctions or basically doing what you're doing, which is using your money
to create more money.
But how do we make that a more comfortable process for people? Like what education would you like to
see? Right. Yeah. It's just like, where do we start? Right. Even the term CDP style loan,
I think is a very like crypto native terminology or,
well,
yes.
Well,
anyways,
yeah,
I only started using it when I started working in DeFi,
but basically,
yeah,
there's a lot of education that needs to be done,
like you said.
But I think projects like ours,
DeFi products, they're constantly improving their UX
and UI to make it easier for users to understand what's happening. So when you're taking out a
CDP style loan, for example, it's very important to understand your loan to value ratio, making sure that you're not at risk of liquidation when there's fluctuation in the price of your underlying asset.
So for balance, for example, like from the very beginning, we always had in mind as the target user to be just a normie crowd who is like very new to crypto.
So we always had in place designs like a slide bar that visually shows, you know,
you know, what risk you're taking when you're taking out this loan. And I've seen a lot more
what risk you're taking when you're taking out this loan.
CDP style products, kind of update their UI in alignment with this to make it more visually
easy to understand, like as you go. But then there's also, you know, other ways to supplement these educational efforts by running campaigns where you basically kind of instruct users on like how to take out loans,
kind of incentivize that activity or behavior while also providing content that kind of takes them through the steps.
that kind of takes them through the steps.
We've been producing a lot of video content
and written tutorials on how to do these things
on balance step-by-step.
And stellar users will have access
to all of this material next week
when the user acquisition pilot program starts as well. Oh, that's fun. Okay, so cool.
I want to end a little bit with a discussion on the balanced DAO and DAO governance, just because
I honestly just really like talking about DAOs. I think it's a cool model. So can you walk me through what the DAO is,
what it does, the purpose of it,
and how balanced dollar holders can participate?
Because I believe that's how that works.
But yeah, walk me through that.
Yeah.
Arush, do you want to take a jab at this?
Yeah, yeah, sure.
I mean, essentially, like DAO governance in DeFi is,
balance is not like unique, doesn't run a unique model.
It's a general DAO basically run by the community.
And the community, so basically it decides on how much rewards are.
The Balanced token is distributed to liquidity pools.
How much is every month, what goes to marketing, what goes to the operational running costs
of the Balanced product, what new innovations to invest in.
So essentially, DAO is a decentralized version of a centralized company that decides on day-to-day
activities.
So the DAO is just a decentralized version, if you want to think about it, of a company
taking operational decisions on a day-to-day basis,
plus also long-term decision-making on marketing,
on how to, the future strategies,
and also how to sustain and be grow the protocol.
Very cool.
Yeah, I think it's neat that you have people directly participating.
Okay, let's end with the discussion of the user acquisition pilot, how people can get involved,
what you're looking to get out of that, and yeah, just walk me through what you're planning to do
for the pilot. Elsie, you mentioned a little bit about the educational materials. give a plug for it.
Yeah, so we will be partnering with the Hanna Wallet team throughout this campaign.
So Hanna Wallet has this leaderboard product set up
where projects can basically incentivize users to take certain behaviors like depositing XLM as collateral on balanced or mint a BNUSD loan against their XLM collateral on balanced.
And we can assign XP awards for this type of behavior.
XP awards for this type of behavior. So we've collaborated with the HANA wallet team to make
these cards available on this leaderboard so that when the campaign starts, users can link their
wallets and then get basically earn XP for any engagement, any interaction that they have with the balanced product.
And based on that, after four weeks, users will be given prizes based on their leaderboard rankings
at the end of the four weeks. Very cool. Okay, so when does this kick off and where can people find it? I think you said next week, but like what date?
Yeah, so the campaign starts next week on Monday.
So we'll be releasing this link through multiple accounts.
You will be able to find it on any of our accounts like LC, Algomancer, Arosh.
of our accounts like lc algomancer arosh if you follow any of us um you will see us retweeting
um the link basically um where you can log in to this to the leaderboard cool very fun okay and
where can people keep up with balance project updates you all i know you mentioned x is a good spot but yeah so x would be the best spot um the balanced
defy is the handle for balanced
gotcha good well thank you and then yep yep that link will also be available through the hana wallet
account as well oh nice okay yeah hana is h. HANA is H-A-N-A.
Yes, and we'll be giving out a total pool of 21,000, 21,000-ish USD worth of prizes
for the leaderboard ranking.
So it's going to be a jam-packed four weeks.
That's going to be a jam-packed four weeks that's gonna be really fun cool any final thoughts before we sign out
anyone do we have any questions
well it's on my side just uh on monday make sure you guys uh
side just on Monday make sure you guys race to the Hannah Wallet and get engaged on balance
and as Liz mentioned, to win a big prize pool.
Yeah, that should be really fun.
I'm looking forward to seeing that.
Thank you all so much for joining today.
Appreciate it.
Thank you, Lindsay. I know it's early it. Thank you. Thank you, Lindsay.
I know it's early for you.
No worries.
Bye, everyone.
Thanks for having us.
Take care. Það er hann.
