I've had a stake in a Balancer liquidity pool for a few weeks now. Normally, I have been looking forward to Wednesday mornings (Australian time, I guess Tuesday night for the rest of the world) to see my BAL reward for adding liquidity appear as liquid BAL tokens directly in my Metamask. It's nice to get a weekly income, just for having some money invested into a pool.
But today...
It wasn't there. I checked and nothing arrived. I had anticipated a payout of 2.something BAL tokens (worth around $25) to appear, but it didn't.
Worried, I opened my discord to find an announcement that they had changed from auto-payments to a manual claim process.
mikemcdonald Today at 8:55 AM
BAL distributions for this week and going forward will be done through a claims contract https://claim.balancer.finance/. This is done using a merkle root of the totals published weekly. You can let BAL accumulate multiple weeks and claim in a single tx if desired. Let the team know in #❓support if you run into any issues
From the Balancer Discord
Right - off to claim.
So I head to the link provided and link my Metamask, and hit claim. I had what I thought I would, 2.3872 BAL ready to claim. It was a straightforward MetaMask approval, and a GAS fee. Bugger, it was nice to just receive the tokens each week, gas free. But in the discord, the team have mentioned that they were paying thousands of dollars worth of GAS each week. Fair enough, now the user has to eat the GAS cost. The good thing is that your rewards can be left to accumulate, so you can claim them when it suits. Want to save GAS, do it fortnightly or monthly. Only have a small position or payout, wait until its worth doing. Or just wait until you want the funds to sell or do something with.
As for me, well I am comfortable with hitting that claim button every week. My 2.3 BAL is better off being added into the pool, than sitting Idle. Can't compound your assets if you wait to claim. Don't know if that actually makes sense, but in my head it does.
So, how is the investment going?
Might as well do a weekly performance update while I'm here. The TL,DR is I added a bit more liquidity after the last payout, I earned 2.38 BAL for the week - This is still over 100% APR. The price of BAL went down again this week.
All in all, I'm happy. I saw someone somewhere describe now as being DeFi winter, and it does feel that way. BTC and to a lesser extent ETH are making some moves, but a lot of the market for alts, particularly DeFi alts right now is meh. I'd like to see how this pool and the returns it generates look in a week with a rising BAL price, instead of another down week.
Maybe next week.
Thanks for reading, hope you find this post useful,
Cheers,
JK.
