Balanced has turned a year old.
Suffice it to say, it’s been an eventful first year for one of ICON’s premier DeFi platforms.
Nonetheless, even after January’s crypto meltdown and the subsequent black swan event that sparked a mass liquidation spiral, Balanced is still around and thriving.
Balanced wrote on Elon Musk’s platform, “While many projects have been hacked or the founders moved on, Balanced is still here, and the founders are still building.”
Balanced boasted, “In 12 months, Balanced has become a significantly better product.”
Design team and ICON node validator PARROT9, which designed Balanced, wrote on Twitter, “We hit a lot of important milestones, but what we’re most proud of is how the product and brand have evolved since we first started.”
If you’re into dystopian alternative history, check out one of PARROT9’s early brand concepts for the platform. ICON really dodged a bullet.
On a much more aesthetically pleasing note, PARROT9 is releasing a series of wallpapers and NFTs to celebrate Balanced’s evolution.
So, what has Balanced done in its first year?
Well, let’s see. According to their celebratory Twitter thread:
- Pretty stellar early performance. I mean, when users are depositing USD 1 million in collateral even before the platform is officially launched, you’re doing something right.
- Constant upgrades to the platform. The MVP was pretty basic, but new features such as charts, separate pages for stats and active history and trading views (coming soon) have greatly enhanced usability.
- An average of 843 voters have taken part in 26 proposal votes. Oh, and a vote page was added.
- Anyone can add custom tokens to the UI and create liquidity pools to swap between them.
- While bnUSD initially relied on arbitrageur, rebalancing can now be triggered beyond specific price thresholds. Oh, and bnUSD is now the currency for the CPS, OMM and Optimus.
- There’s now a stablecoin page to help users get their heads around Balanced’s balancing mechanism, something that has proven a challenge.
- Tons of tweaks and improvements like a custom blog, better mobile UI and language support.
- Balanced has doubled the core development team since launch.
Balance believes it has achieved Step 1 of its vision and adoption strategy, namely, securing adoption among ICX holders.
Once BTP launches, the platform can move on to Step 2: securing existing crypto holders. Indeed, they’ve already designed a UI to transfer assets between blockchain for integration with BTP (and its interim solution, ICON Bridge).
Before Balanced can go further, however, they need to resolve a particular issue.
“To make bnUSD compatible across all connected networks, a new token standard could be created to allow bnUSD to be minted/burned via BTP messages,” writes Balanced. “For example, bnUSD on ICON could be sent to Near and treated as a native token.”
