Balancer’s new MetaStable Pools seek to facilitate wrapped asset swaps

Automated market maker (AMM) and decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol Balancer announced Monday that it had partnered with DAO-based staking platform Lido to introduce a MetaStable Pool incentive program.

MetaStable Pools are liquidity pools specifically designed to work with highly correlated (but not hard-pegged) tokens, like wrapped assets. Users will be able to create swaps between MetaStable pools and assets integrated with other liquidity pools while benefiting from cheaper swap prices and eliminating the need for individual swap-specific stable pools. They will also prevent the dilution of liquidity from existing pools and increase maximum trade amounts, according to the release.

The first pool listing, of staked Ether (stETH) and wrapped staked Ether (wstETH), aims to offer liquidity for stakers on the Ethereum network. The pool will be sponsored by both LDO and BAL rewards at an allocation of 2500 BAL per week and an additional 25,000 LIDO per week for the first month. The first distribution is set to take place on August 24 via the Balancer claim portal.

Back in July, Balancer introduced stable pools with tighter spreads and lower slippage than the platform’s other pools. This update made Balancer the only automated market maker with 3 different types of liquidity pools: weighted, element and stable.

Earlier this month, the CEO of Unstoppable Domains predicted that the stablecoin market would hit $1T by 2025 — or potentially even sooner. He did, however, emphasize that the proliferation of stablecoins could give rise to volatility concerns, and lead to further questions about the regulatory uncertainty of pegged assets.