New Balancer Token More Than Doubles in Price as COMP Drops Sharply

After an impressive rise – and subsequent fall – in price for Compound Finance’s COMP token over the past weekend, a new contender has already arrived to the DeFi land, making a splash on the first day after it started distributing its new token to users.

The new platform in question is Balancer, a protocol that describes itself as “an automated portfolio manager, liquidity provider, and price sensor.” And according to ranking website DeFi Pulse, the protocol is already seeing huge success in the decentralized finance (DeFi) market, with a growth in the total locked USD value of more than 41% over the past day alone.

However, the growth in locked value is not everything the new platform has going for itself. Just yesterday, the company behind the platform, Balancer Labs, confirmed that it has started to distribute its own BAL Governance Token to users.

According to a blog post from the team, the first tokens are to be distributed to users who have already earned them by depositing assets onto the protocol, a concept known as “liquidity mining.”

According to the token’s contract address on Etherscan, BAL is trading at USD 20.5 as of press time (09:50 UTC), up a massive 132% for the day. A price of USD 18.5 is stated by the new analytics and ranking website DeFi Market Cap, where the BAL token was listed just today.

Meanwhile, Compound’s COMP token is down by nearly 24% over the past 24 hours to trade at a price of USD 227, according to the same source.

As reported, just days after it first entered into circulation, COMP positioned itself as the most valuable token in the DeFi space.

The Balancer platform, which announced its launch as recently as March 31st this year, makes it clear on its website that it’s still “very much a beta product,” and that users should only use small amounts of money to start with.

Also in March this year, Balancer Labs announced that it had raised USD 3 million in capital for its project from venture capital firms Placeholder and Accomplice.