The launch of Balanced, the first decentralized bank in ICON has been a huge success. On the fourth day, we have been tracking some big numbers as follows.
- Total Balanced Dollars: 13,770,211
- Total Value Locked-TVL (collateral): $90.3 million
- Total Value Locked-TVL (DEX): $65.2 million
- Total Number of Borrowers: 1,845
- Total Number of Liquidity providers: 554 (sICX/ICX), 1,241 (sICX/bnUSD), 1,037 (BALN/bnUSD)
- Total fees generated: $239.7k
We believe it is the right time to hear from the people involved in bringing Balanced to this shape and form with their dedication, hard work, and smarts. Balanced has been a collective effort between ICX station, Parrot 9, ICONOsphere, and Mousebelt. In this article, we look at the hard work that went beyond the scene from the perspective of the ICONOsphere team.
The experience of the programmers and managers is presented below in their own words to give it a feel of authenticity and to get a peek into the minds. These opinions and experiences shared below give the human dimension and insight into how a new product comes into the picture and the different stages that it goes through before seeing the light of the day. It also sheds some light on the complexity of balanced with various features and milestones and how the developers perceive to be the important and critical features of the product. This is also an example of how a team working remotely and across different time zones can cope with deadlines and bring their collective energy to bear on a problem at hand. Hopefully, the article also informs those designing new software products what to expect and what pitfalls to avoid.
Abhinayak Swar:
I was involved in working with the team to write tests for the SCOREs (smart contract on the reliable environment) of balanced.
My overall impression of balanced is that it is a very interesting defi (decentralized finance) product that allows users to hold on to their crypto assets by depositing them and taking out loans with a very minimal fee. You also get to earn BALN tokens by depositing and loaning or by providing liquidity. This token is promising in terms of its value and also governance possibilities, as you can get a share of the network fee and also have voting rights for the future of the product. A user can also come in and deposit and still get high staking rewards, on top of the other possible benefits.
One important factor is that the user interface and user experience is great in balanced. The app is very easy to use and the steps needed to do things like borrow, deposit, add liquidity, DEX, etc. look very simple and straightforward to use, which I think is very useful for a complex product like Balanced.
The future possibilities of Balanced are also very promising. Currently, there is the only bnUSD as a synthetic asset but later there is a possibility of adding much more like stocks, gold, other cryptocurrencies, that can be owned by the users. This opens up a lot of possibilities for investors to invest in things like saying Facebook stocks (if it’s added to the Balanced), which they would have never had a chance to own. Also, the user never has to leave the ICON crypto environment to do all these transactions.
We did encounter some challenges but we were able to overcome them with timely intervention working together. Balanced is a complex product and coming up with a framework to test that fits all cases was difficult. The concept of the product was and still is also new to most of the testing team, so everyone coming up to speed also took some time.
Saurya Paudel:
I along with my team was mostly involved with testing the UI/UX in the balanced platform. I was coordinating the team remotely due to the increasing amount of Covid cases in the country. The experience of working remotely with the team from various time zones has never been so daring and exciting at the same time. The only thing we were focused on was to have a product with less complication from the users’ perspective. And the pressure to complete in the right time can’t be denied not only in case of balanced but also for any product launch.
We encountered various challenges at first during testing, starting right from understanding the details for the use cases. However, the user interface made it simpler for me to start as a first-time user. We used some scenarios to test the functionality of the platform and listed out some of the bugs we faced during the testing. Those bugs were reported to the respective team and we went through the testing once there were new updates.
As we moved ahead with the testing, we got to learn more about the economics of the Balanced platform. The effort it took to bring this product into life with the help of all the team members from different P-reps (public representatives on ICON governance) and individuals is really commendable.
While testing the platform I also felt lucky to be someone getting to experience this disruptive and transformative technology at first hand. It’s great to see how the ideation of a DeFi product has come to its implementation. One of the amazing moments I felt was the response from the community during the launch of Balanced. It was great to be a part of this process and I want to congratulate everyone for the successful outcome.
Ajaya Mandal:
The balanced launch is very exciting and it has added a new realm of DeFI to the ICON ecosystem. I think overall it’s an excellent DeFi platform and I feel very proud to have been part of it. I worked in distributing the dividends to the LP (Liquidity Provider token) holders as well as staked BALN holders.
It took about six weeks to complete the work. I remember working closely with Suyog in the development of this project.
The challenge was to effectively distribute the dividends to all the eligible receivers. Technically, there was also a challenge in improving the time complexity of the code which we succeeded by changing the data structure required to improve the time complexity of the code.
Suyog Adhikari:
As a software developer/ Blockchain developer, working on balanced was an overwhelming experience for me. Working on a defi platform itself is a big thing. It was a collaborative work with other P-reps so had the opportunity to work with various amazing and talented people. Learned how the other team work. Learned about economics as it is a defi platform . Overall the experience was great.
Working for the past six months on balanced, we gave all our best efforts for the final product and now it is live. People are giving amazing responses, the platform itself is appreciated by the whole community. As a developer this is the most satisfying moment ever. Nothing beats that feeling of users/Community appreciating your work.
Sudeep Simkhada:
It was a great experience and honor to be the part of the first DeFi platform of ICON Network. Being involved in my first DeFi project I got to learn more about the platform and the whole ecosystem. With the months of hard work from the team, finally we have launched the project successfully and it feels great to see amazing response on the project.
I personally have been involved in the project since the beginning. In this period of two-three months, I have faced many challenges and solved those challenges. I was particularly involved in the testing of the smart contracts which was completely new for me. Through continuous support and coordination from the team, we have tested the contracts successfully. I am thankful to all the team members for the cooperation and effort on this project.
I believe Balanced will be a game-changer in the ICON Network DeFi platform and I am looking forward to being involved in such amazing projects in the future.
Sudeep Bhandari:
As a Blockchain/Software developer, it was a great experience working on the Balanced project. Balanced was a collaborative work with other P-Reps like ICX Station, Parrot9, ICONDAO, and MouseBelt, which allowed me to work and learn from the best-experienced developers in the community. As it is a de-fi platform, I also got an opportunity to gain some knowledge of economics and finance.
I got to work on this project for the last two months. My major part of this project was on code review and testing of the SCOREs of the Balanced. As I get the chance to review and test the code done by some of the best-developers in the community (like Galen Danziger of Mousebelt and Daniel Brehmer of ICONOSPHERE ), there was a great learning experience for the future.
I was also involved solely in the development of the Airdrip SCORE which distributes the `BALN` token and allows users to claim the token. Airdrip was a different experience to work on.
To sum up, it was a great experience working for Balanced.
Based on the experiences shared by the ICONOsphere team above, we can come to the conclusion there is a lot of hard work and collective effort that goes below the radar while coming up with a new product. Especially in the case of balanced, due to the highly complex nature of the project incorporating different functions of a bank and decentralized exchange, there were many glitches and bugs that had to be tested and tackled before it was launched. It was a race against time and the team members feel accomplished that they were able to bring such a marvelous product and they feel that their hard work has paid off when they see the immense response from the ICON community to this new product. They also anticipate the bright future for balanced and can’t wait to bring another project to fruition. Stay Tuned!
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