BAL for Gas
The BAL for Gas program has become an important mechanism for distributing Balancer protocol governance power to one of its widest user bases: traders.
To ensure lasting robustness of the governance process, both liquidity providers and traders should have a say in how the protocol evolves. While liquidity providers receive BAL as a function of the amount of liquidity provided in the system, traders earn BAL for swapping tokens on the Balancer Exchange dApp.
Every eligible trade made through the Balancer Exchange Proxy results in some BAL being allocated to the address (EOAs only) that sent the transaction. An eligible trade is a trade containing one or more eligible swaps, where an eligible swap is one between any two tokens on the allowlist. Claims are made available at the BAL claims interface on Wednesday (00:00 UTC) following the end (00:00 UTC Monday) of the weekly period in which the trade occurred.
The amount of BAL awarded to a trade is a function of the number of eligible swaps in the trade (N), which determines a number of gas units (G), the median gas price [1] of the block the transaction was included in (M), and the BAL/ETH price provided by CoinGecko closest to the block time (P).
1 swap:
G=90000gas units2+ swaps:
G=140000gas units
The amount of BAL to be received by the user for a trade is computed as
Because this program only partially covers gas costs (with very specific caps to prevent attempts at gaming the system), and doesn’t cover trading fees, it does not incentivize wash trading or trading any more than a user was initially planning. Estimates are provided on the UI, but actual values are computed off-chain weekly using an open source script, so that any suspicious activity can be filtered out.
80,000 BAL from the Ecosystem Fund have been allocated to the “BAL for Gas’’ campaign, starting on March 8th 2021. There is no fixed time period; the budget is consumed on a first-come, first-served basis. When the budget is exhausted, the campaign is suspended until it is replenished by BAL governance.
The BAL for Gas program also applies to trades which are executed on Balancer V1. The program is much the same as for V2 except for changes to the number of gas units reimbursed per swap.
1 swap:
G=130000gas units2 swaps:
G=220000gas units3 swaps:
G=300000gas units4+ swaps:
G=400000gas units
[1] Transactions sent by the miner of the block or having a gas price of 10 Gwei or less are not considered for the purposes of determining the median gas price of the block
