Guide to Perpetual Protocol’s Balancer LBP

Perpetual Protocol
Perpetual Protocol
Published in
4 min readSep 8, 2020

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Perpetual Protocol will be distributing 7.5 million PERP via a Balancer Liquidity Bootstrapping Pool on Sep 9, 2020 at about 6:00am UTC.

The Balancer LBP will start from block 10825600 and end at block 1084645, approximately three days. The weights of the LBP will gradually change from PERP:USDC = 90:10 to PERP:USDC = 30:70 during that period, creating downward pressure on the price.

You can find out details about the distribution here. For detailed calculations on how the LBP should progress, please see this spreadsheet.

How to Participate in Perpetual Protocol’s LBP

If you are not familiar with Perpetual Protocol, or concepts like vAMM or liquidity mining, we suggest you take a look at the following articles before participating:

You can also learn about Balancer’s Liquidity Bootstrapping Pools here. They are a special type of weight-shifting pool designed for token distributions.

In order to swap PERP token on Balancer LBP, users will have to go through three steps:

  1. Install and set up MetaMask
  2. Navigate to Balancer LBP via perp.fi
  3. Swap $PERP

We detail these steps below:

1. Install and Setup MetaMask

We recommend using MetaMask, which is a Web3 enabled cryptocurrency wallet, to swap tokens on Balancer LBP. You can download the MetaMask extension directly in browsers such as Google Chrome, Firefox. In addition to Metamask, Balancer also supports WalletConnect, Coinbase, Portis, etc. This guide will focus on the use of Metamask, which is similar to other wallets.

After preparing Metamask, you need to prepare two cryptocurrencies 1) ETH to pay transaction fees on Ethereum and 2) USDC to exchange for PERP tokens.

While other tokens can also be used, we recommend preparing USDC. Balancer’s multi-pool routing means other tokens besides USDC can be used, but may result in a higher price as extra hops will be required.

2. Navigate to Balancer LBP via perp.fi

2.1 Go to perp.fi

2.2 Go to Balancer LBP Introduction Page

There is a live price chart developed by Perpetual Protocol to help you to know the current price trend immediately.

2.3 Go directly to the Balancer LBP page through the button on perp.fi.

Balancer is an n-dimensional automated market-maker built on Ethereum. Once you arrive at Balancer, you should see a page similar to the one below.

Here are the contract addresses of PERP token and the PERP/USDC pool contract address for your reference

  • The PERP token address — 0xbC396689893D065F41bc2C6EcbeE5e0085233447
  • Balancer LBP address — 0xbfb4b21887ebb3542bde0a9997d481debc6e072b

⚠️Please check for the right token contract address. We will not compensate you for the loss if you swap for the wrong PERP token.

2.4 Unlock your wallet

Next, you need to allow Balancer to spend your USDC first so that you can interact with Balancer smart contracts continually. Submit the transaction and wait for it to confirm.

3. Swap PERP

🚨 IMPORTANT - DO NOT SWAP PERP TOKENS TOO EARLY OR YOU WILL GET REKT 🚨

That’s it! Once you have submitted your bids, all you have to do is wait until MetaMask updates the transaction status from “PENDING” to “SUCCESS” in a few minutes.

Please remember to prepare a small amount of ETH as the gas fee(transaction fee) to Swap your USDC for PERP token.

If you can’t see PERP token in your wallet, copy and paste the token contract below to “add PERP token” to MetaMask manually.

Token Contract Address : 0xbC396689893D065F41bc2C6EcbeE5e0085233447

Token Symbol: PERP

Decimals of Precision: 18

The Balancer LBP will be live for 3 days and is designed to prevent front-running. It will start at a high price then go down quickly as the weights of the pool change. This prevents people from front-running other people.

After the 3-day period, part of the proceeds will be used to seed a Balancer shared pool. This shared pool will be seeded using parts of the proceeds from the LBP, and use the last price from the LBP.

PERP holders can also add liquidity to this shared pool and receive liquidity mining rewards. We will release details about this later.

Resources

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