What wallets does Balancer support?
Any wallet that supports Wallet Connect, a Portis or Fortmatic platform or Coinbase wallet, as well as web3 integrated wallets like metamask, opera or brave
What is the cost of trading on Balancer?
Balancer does not charge for interacting with the platform. You will, however, need to pay the gas fees. If you haven't heard about gas: this is the price of mining a transaction on the Ethereum network. This is a fee automatically burned (no, no one gets your gas, it dissapears into the thin air - think of a car burning fuel) whenever you interact with the Ethereum network - it doesn't matter if you succeed or not (eg. get the token you wanted). The gas amount is not dependant on the amount of token you want to buy, but how computationally intensive the request is, eg. unlocking your tokens is cheap but buying a new token is expensive
Prerequisites
At the bare minimum, you'll need an Ethereum Wallet and some ETH
- Balancer supports MetaMask, Coinbase Wallet (NOT Coinbase Pro platform!), and any wallets that use WalletConnect, Portis, and Fortmatic
- You can purchase ETH for fiat on Coinbase, Gemini, etc.
Trying things out
Don't do your first transaction with real money. It will cost you gas fees no matter how successful you are. You can play around on the test network with test tokens:
Go to https://gitter.im/kovan-testnet/faucet#, log in and send a message with your ETH kovan wallet address. You will get 6 ETH every 24h. Any step you take to work on kovan tokens, you will need to add "kovan" to the web address. eg kovan.balancer.exchange
Install a Web3.0 waller browser extension for your wallet. This will help with the approval process, it isn't necessary, but will be way easier.
Step-by-Step
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Go to Balancer and click on the ”connect wallet” button to connect (see prerequisites). Make sure you choose the right network in your wallet.
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SAFETY NOTES: Please make sure that you are really connected to actual Balancer exchange. You are dealing with money and money means incentives for scammers. We cannot prevent it, so if you have doubts, email [email protected].
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Pick the token you want to sell and enter the amount, and pick the token you want to receive.
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Adjust Slippage in top right corner - read more if you never heard about it.
Most of the time for your first transaction you do not need to worry about it. Slippage is also known as the Price Impact Tolerance (PIT) and it simply means what is the range of price you are willing to pay for a token eg uou want to buy BAL with USDC and the rate that is displayed is 0.028167. The market is always changing so even in the seconds it takes you to hit "swap" and get the transaction submitted the price will change. When you choose PIT eg. 1%, you basically say "I am willing to pay anywhere between 0.02788533 and 0.02844867 for 1 USDC". If the rate is out of this range the transaction will not go through but you will pay the gas fee.
