Shard Labs is excited to announce the creation of a Polygon solution that allows users to enter Lido’s liquid staking without spending significant amounts of capital for transactions on Ethereum mainnet. To make this happen, an integration with Balancer Protocol was an essential milestone.
The first phase was executed during the launch of Phase 1 Lido on Polygon. The second phase will be happening with the launch of Lido for Polygon on Apr 11, 2022. This is when the liquidity mining program will start which will have triple token rewards ($BAL, $LDO, and $MATIC). This means that liquidity providers will get BAL, LDO, and MATIC tokens as an incentive for enabling users to trade. ???
What is Balancer?
Balancer is a permissionless decentralized Protocol that serves as a trading platform (aka. DEX which is short for the decentralized exchange) for users to trade tokens in a very efficient way.
Their protocol is governed by the Balancer token ($BAL), which can be earned via liquidity mining by depositing cryptocurrencies into Balancer’s pools.
Balancer has SOR (smart order routing) that allows users to buy stMATIC with another token that is not directly paired, like USDC. It works in a way that when users select USDC/stMATIC trading pair, Balancer will route the trade through existing pairs.
* USDC (USD Coin) is a digital currency that is fully backed by U.S. dollar assets. USDC is a tokenized U.S. dollar, with the value of one USDC coin pegged 1:1 to the value of one U.S. dollar. The value of USDC is designed to remain stable, making USDC a stablecoin.
For example — let’s take the following two live token pairs: MATIC/USDC pair and stMATIC/MATIC pair. And let’s say that a user wishes to buy stMATIC for 100 USDC. This is how the process will go:
- MATIC will be bought for 100 USDC (MATIC/USDC)
- stMATIC will be bought for that MATIC (stMATIC/MATIC)
This purchase will be done without spending huge amounts of money on transactions. Which is pretty neat — don’t you think?
BTW Balancer code is fully open-source. Check out the code here: https://github.com/balancer-labs/
Want stMATIC but don’t want to stake MATIC?
As you know, Polygon staking is Ethereum based (MATIC tokens). So if you want to get stMATIC, but you do not want to stake your MATIC, we have a perfect solution for you!
You can swap directly on Balancer with your mainnet MATIC ??? here.
Already staked and want to earn some rewards?
Liquid staking wouldn’t be too useful if we don’t provide some utility to the token, right?
As of today, you can provide liquidity for other traders on Balancer and earn a chunk of fees for each trade they make! More trades -> more rewards, and trust us, we already got a lot of questions on how to get stMATIC without paying for gas on Ethereum ?
Just make sure you have wMATIC and stMATIC tokens ready, add them to the pool, and enjoy the rewards.
Stay tuned for future announcements because there might be additional incentive programs upcoming ?
The best way to keep up with all the updates is to follow our Twitter account or our Medium posts regularly.
