Balancer
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Balancer V2
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Oracles
Overview
Some Balancer pools have oracle functionality, which allows them to be price sensors for their tokens as well as their own Balancer Pool Tokens (BPTs). These oracles can be used in two ways:
- Instantaneous Price
- Time Weighted Average Price (TWAP)
Some Balancer pools that have Oracle functionality are:
- WeightedPool2Tokens
- MetaStablePool
Instantaneous Price
Querying Instantaneous Price is a low gas operation useful for applications where price manipulation is not of great concern. These queries can be done using:
Time Weighted Average Price
Oracles can be queried for a Time Weighted Average within time frames ranging from a minimum of 2 minutes to a maximum of ~34.1 hours. These queries can be done using:
Calculating TWAP
Oracles keep an accumulator with the sum of all past values, each weighted by the time elapsed since the previous update. This lets us later subtract accumulators at different points in time and divide by the time elapsed between them, arriving at the geometric mean of the values (also known as log-average).
The Accumulator
Price data for each sample is kept within an accumulator.
The accumulator is structured with:
- 10 bits for the head index (explained in more detail below)
- 32 bits for the
timestampof when the acc was last updated - 214 bits for
priceAccwhich is the actual accumulator of the pair price. The price accumulator is factored into two numbers:price: 182 bits =~ 6.13 * 10^54, so we have a huge range of possible prices even given the fact that prices will always be scaled to 10^18.priceMultiplier: instead of storing thepriceAccdirectly in a 214 bit-word we factor it into two components, thepriceand thepriceMultipliersuch thatpriceAcc = price * priceMultiplier.The reason for this is that while the accumulated price is only useful when two timestamps are taken into consideration for a TWAP, having the instant price information available can be extremely valuable for some use cases.
The Circular Buffer
Maintenance of oracles using Uniswap TWAP has been one of the main pain points for teams using it. They have to have incentive schemes in place to make sure that their contracts are storing snapshots of the Uniswap accumulator in a given frequency.
In order for our oracle to not require maintenance, we store 2^10 = 1024 snapshots of the main accumulator at least two minutes apart from each other. These snapshots are stored in a simple circular buffer, where the 1025th element will just overwrite the first snapshot with index 0. This means that we can provide a TWAP for any duration larger than 2 minutes and smaller than 1024 * 2 min = 2048 min =~ 34.1h.
Last modified 18d ago