Balancer protocol is one of the many automated market maker-powered decentralized exchanges on the Ethereum blockchain. However, what sets it apart from others is its unique feature: self-balancing of liquidity pools. Liquidity providers can establish a pool with up to 8 different assets, and ETH does not have to be one of them. Therefore, liquidity providers can use their pool as a self-balancing portfolio of assets which also generates returns from arbitrage and slippage reduction, at the tradeoff of it being public.
The Balancer protocol launch happened in March 2020 after two years of research and development, but it wasn't until June 2020 that the developers launched the BAL governance tokens. The native tokens can be earned through liquidity provision to shared and smart pools. Like all supported by the protocol tokens, BAL is compliant with the ERC20 standard.