Swappas

A reference table of 78 crypto swap venues, scored on six axes. No affiliate links, no paid placement.

← Table

Balancer

caution No KYC On-chain DEX no account open source

6.7/10 total

A generalised AMM whose pools can hold up to eight assets at arbitrary weights, used heavily for liquid staking tokens and yield-bearing stable pools. Marked caution for a serious and recent incident: on 3 November 2025 an attacker exploited precision loss in the invariant calculation of Balancer v2 Composable Stable Pools v5 to manipulate BPT pricing, taking an estimated $95M-$128M across Balancer and its forks. v3 and other v2 pool types used a different code path and were not affected.

Scores

No-KYC 9
Fees 8
Privacy 4
Custody 10
Record 4
Coverage 6

Weights are published in the method and applied identically to every entry.

For

  • No account, no email, no identity verification
  • Non-custodial: the vault holds pool assets under contract logic, not under an operator's keys
  • Multi-asset weighted pools give good pricing on liquid staking tokens and correlated baskets that two-asset AMMs handle badly
  • Operating since March 2020 across eight-plus EVM chains, with contracts and the SOR routing library open source
  • Ran a real bug bounty process: paid a 1,000,000 USDC bounty to the whitehat who disclosed the August 2023 rounding bug

Against

  • 3 November 2025: Balancer v2 Composable Stable Pool v5 exploit via invariant precision loss, roughly $95M-$128M taken across Balancer and forks. Some funds were clawed back by third parties such as StakeWise's emergency multisig, but this is a large and recent loss of LP capital
  • August 2023: a disclosed rounding-error vulnerability in ERC4626 linear pools put around 20% of TVL at risk and roughly $900k was taken before users could exit, despite advance public warning
  • June 2020: an earlier exploit drained pools containing deflationary tokens, so this is a pattern of pool-math edge cases rather than a single event
  • Pool-level fees can be set anywhere up to 10%, and governance takes up to 50% of collected swap fees
  • Every trade is permanently public on-chain and attributable to your wallet; front end sees your IP, and there is no onion service or no-JavaScript path

Agent access 9/10

Public GraphQL API and an open-source Smart Order Router SDK give quoting without an account, and the vault is callable directly from a funded wallet.

Reported separately and not counted in the total. It measures what an autonomous agent can do unattended, not whether the service is safe to use.

Fees

pool-set, 0.0001%-10%

Swap fee limits in v3 are set at the pool level, not the vault level: roughly 0.001%-10% for weighted pools and 0.0001%-10% for stable pools. Governance takes a protocol cut of collected swap fees, up to 50%, and a pool creator can additionally take a share of what remains. In practice liquid pools sit far below the ceiling, but the schedule is per-pool and there is no fixed tier to rely on.

Specification

Type
On-chain DEX
KYC policy
No KYC
Custody model
onchain
Account required
no
Assets
hundreds
Chains
8+
Operating since
2020
Jurisdiction
none
Onion service
no
Works without JS
no
Open source
yes
Facts checked
2026-07-31

Links

https://balancer.fi

Plain links, no referral parameters. Verify the domain yourself; phishing clones of every service in this table exist.