In the latest “Lego of money” feat of decentralized finance (DeFi), the lending platform Aave and Automated Market Maker (AMM) Balancer have teamed up on a hybrid liquidity and lending function that can significantly increase depositors’ earnings.
In a post by blog today, the CEO of Balancer, Fernando Martinelli, unveiled the plans for the project, called Balancer V2 Asset Manager. In essence, the integration will allow users to earn two forms of return on their deposits: trade fees and yield farming from Balancer, as well as loan interest from Aave.
In the current Balancer architecture, users deposit their funds in a liquidity pool to enable decentralized trading of assets. In return, they receive a portion of the trading commissions, as well as the yield farming of Balancer’s native governance token, BAL.
Nevertheless, most of the assets of the AMM pools are not used, as they are not needed unless an unusually large operation occurs.
“Large trades cause a lot of slippage, so traders avoid them. This means that, as long as prices don’t change too much, a pool could facilitate exactly the same trades with really much less liquidity.” it reads in the post.
In the Aave-Balancer Asset Manager. Unused tokens in Balancer’s liquidity pool will be loaned on Aave for additional return, and the automated asset manager will facilitate the transfer of funds between protocols.
This allows for the amalgamation of two of DeFi’s most powerful and most common 2 Lego pieces, which Martinelli said in a statement to Cointelegraph is “the best of both worlds”.
If potential users want to estimate the kind of profit this could bring, Martinelli suggests a simple combination of Balancer returns with 80% of Aave returns on top:
“I would say maybe around 80% of the average AAVE returns of the different tokens + all the Balancer trading fees. 80% because we will keep a buffer (20% I would estimate) for trades to occur.”
Many of the details of the architecture are still being refined, especially in regards to the parameters of the exchanges between protocols. The investigator Placeholder Ventures’ Alex Evans is investigating exchange optimizations, and Martinelli notes that the “gatekeepers” responsible for running exchanges have not yet been chosen, and research is being done on how to incentivize gatekeepers.
The post also notes that deeper collaborations are possible, such as Balancer’s liquidity provider tokens as collateral on Aave.
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