Two major crypto institutions, Pantera and Alameda, announce investment in Balancer governance token.

After the DeFi craze has cooled off, despite the reduced profits, recent DeFi tokens have shown signs of recovery in the market's overall uptrend. Notably, prominent venture capital firm Pantera and quantitative trading firm Alameda have announced that they have invested in the automated market-making platform Balancer by purchasing governance tokens.

According to Balancer's official announcement, Pantera and Alameda directly acquired token shares held by the Balancer Labs team, rather than purchasing them from the market. During the issuance of governance token BAL on June 24th, 25% was allocated to founders, core developers, advisors, and early investors; while 75% was distributed to participants through liquidity mining.

Balancer – One of Uniswap's Competitors

Balancer is an Automated Market Maker (AMM), similar to Uniswap, where a liquidity pool is created with two tokens (e.g., DAI/ETH) and prices are automatically adjusted based on its algorithm. The token ratio (supply and demand) affects price changes without the need for a counterparty.

Each AMM project has slightly different algorithms. Unlike Uniswap, Balancer does not limit the assets in the liquidity pool to two tokens but allows up to eight assets in a single pool.

Balancer's governance token BAL has shown remarkable performance in the market recently. It has increased by 33.5% from November 4th until now. After announcing investments from two major institutions, it has also seen a 10% increase in the past 24 hours before the deadline.

Pantera, Alameda?

Founded in 2013, Pantera Capital, based in California, is the first U.S. investment institution focusing on blockchain technology, cryptocurrency projects, and the blockchain ecosystem. Despite the increasing number of cryptocurrency venture capital institutions in recent years, Pantera remains active in the crypto space.

Alameda Research is a well-known quantitative team and market maker in the crypto industry. Its founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, also owns the FTX exchange, which continuously innovates its products. Sam has been active in the DeFi space in the second half of this year, launching the decentralized derivatives trading platform Serum and acquiring SushiSwap, another AMM platform. Sam's presence can be seen in various mainstream DeFi projects.

In addition to the investments from these two major institutions, development platforms NEAR Protocol and privacy computing platform Oasis Network have announced that Balancer will be ported to their platforms. As a result, Balancer has become the first AMM project to span multiple public chains.

Although the investors are well-known institutions, it does not guarantee that such cryptocurrencies have long-term investment value. According to thematic reports, we found that investing in projects backed by Pantera does not guarantee profits, so one should maintain a cautious investment attitude at all times.