Stellar Community Fund

By Balanced

Balanced to Stellar - Relay 2

SCF #29

$72.0K

Legacy v5.0 Community Award

Awarded

Balanced is a cross-chain DEX and stablecoin that enablesnative cross-chain DeFi primitives for any ecosystem.

Products & Services

Balanced is a cross-chain DEX and CDP-style stablecoin. You can connect your native wallet, deposit native collateral, borrow bnUSD, and swap native assets cross-chain with Balanced. A portion of the ICON network's monthly ICX emissions go towards liquidity in cross-chain liquidity pools.

You can see the benefits to the user from user reviews here: https://balanced.network/reviews/, the app itself here: https://app.balanced.network/, and the on-chain statistics here: https://stats.balanced.network/. We also have an active Discord community here: https://discord.gg/ru2bJ6JRxG.

There are 4 main services in this project: 1. Balanced smart contracts - these are the DEX operations. These were written as part of our previous Activation Grant deliverables. 2. xCall smart contracts - While our focus is on Balanced and the end user, this connection also provides the infrastructure for anyone to easily make arbitrary cross-chain function calls to any of the chains ICON is connected to. The ICON blockchain serves as a router if it is not the source or destination chain of these calls. These were written as part of our previous Activation Grant deliverables. 3. Centralized relay - This relays messages between ICON and Stellar. We have implemented a variety of cross-chain protocols, ranging from trusted to trustless. Trustless bridging takes a lot more work and is a lot more expensive to verify source chain messages on the destination chain, so for the scope of this project we are focused on higher speed and lower transaction cost. There are currently two entities that operate the centralized relays, the ICON Foundation and Lydia Labs, and their on-chain messages must agree in order for a transaction to execute. This is the focus of the deliverables for this Community Award application. 4. Frontend user interface - You can see our interface at https://balanced.network/. For example, you can natively swap AVAX from Avalanche with ICX from ICON, deposit native AVAX to mint bnUSD on Avalanche, or deposit native ICX to mint bnUSD on ICON. To be able to do similarly with native XLM on Stellar are among the end results of this project.

In the previous Activation Award phase, we wrote Balanced and xCall Soroban smart contracts. In this Community Award phase, we will add Stellar to the centralized relay so that the Balanced and xCall Soroban smart contracts on Stellar can communicate with the Balanced and xCall Java smart contracts on ICON. Note that because ICON is a central hub connected to other chains, it will also be able to propagate communication to other connected chains as well, such as Avalanche.