It’s now been 5 weeks since the launch, and the amount of activity we’ve already seen on Balanced is incredible. Here are some of the highlights:

• 10 million Balanced Dollars created within the first 50 hours
• 25 million Balanced Dollars created within 12 days
• 10% of the ICX circulating supply locked in the collateral pool within 16 days
• 2,852+ borrowers
• 2,079+ unique liquidity providers
• 10,000+ BALN holders
• $1M income created through network fees
• $135M locked in collateral and $90M in the DEX, for a total value of $225M

The total value locked in Balanced before the recent price correction was enough for it to rank in the mid 20’s on DeFi Pulse.

The expected returns in the first few days were astronomical, with APYs topping out over 12,000%. There were also plenty of arbitrage opportunities based on the sICX/bnUSD price compared to the current market price of ICX. This was a side effect of low liquidity and has since balanced itself out, but it did lead to questions about the price oracles.

Band Protocol is our oracle provider, and also a strategic partner, so this is a great opportunity to reflect on the role their oracles play, and how they’ll help Balanced expand into other ecosystems.

Price security with a scalable, decentralized oracle

Balanced was designed to be the foundation of ICON’s DeFi ecosystem. It requires ICX as collateral, which is staked in the form of sICX. sICX uses Band Protocol’s ICX/USD price feed to maintain the proper value during retirements, and to calculate your risk ratio.

With the interoperability and cross-chain capabilities coming in BTP (Blockchain Transmission Protocol), Balanced could allow you to collateralize assets from other blockchains. This will decouple Balanced’s success from the supply and value of ICX, and make it easier for newcomers to adopt. Band oracles will be essential to maintain price accuracy for all new assets we support.

To avoid price instability, like flash crashes on a single exchange, the Band Oracle aggregates price data from a growing range of sources, including Binance, OKex, Upbit, Huobi, and CoinGecko. The price feed updates every 5 minutes, or whenever the price deviates by 0.5%, to make sure people interact with the most reliable and secure price feeds.

Unlocking the $89.5 trillion stock market on Balanced

Our integration with Band Protocol, the first-mover for stock/equity price oracles, was strategic, and critical to our vision of a decentralized financial infrastructure that’s trustless and permissionless in all facets, including oracle.

In addition to providing reliable, decentralized oracles, Band’s value as a partner comes from their input on the protocol design and economics, and their connections to leading DeFi projects, exchanges, and more.

Band Protocol will also play an integral role in the future, when Balanced supports other pegged assets. Balanced can use Band Oracles to mint synthetic commodities, equities, cryptocurrencies, and more — and maintain the most accurate price data.

Band gives the Balanced DAO flexibility to add any synthetic asset to Balanced, so it can truly provide the foundation for a decentralized financial infrastructure.

Want to know more? We’ll cover the other strategic partners and the roles they play over the coming weeks.

If there’s any content you’d like to see from Balanced, let us know in the comments, on Twitter, or Telegram.