DeFi Tokens BAL, REN Prices Rise on Coinbase Listing

San Francisco-based exchange Coinbase today listed Balancer, the coin that powers the non-custodial portfolio manager and liquidity provider of the same name, and Ren, a coin that powers a protocol for moving cryptocurrencies between blockchains. 

Coinbase added the coins to its brokerage service today, meaning you can buy them directly from and sell them to Coinbase through both its website and mobile apps.

Coinbase listed Balancer (BAL) and Ren (REN) on Coinbase Pro, its fully-fledged cryptocurrency exchange, yesterday. Its brokerage service is more expensive but more convenient, as you can trade the coins for cash rather than for other cryptocurrencies.

BAL rose 0.14% following the Coinbase listing, from $13.54 to $13.96, per data metrics site CoinMarketCap. Its overall daily trading volume increased by $5 million, from $58 billion to $63 billion. But in the past 24 hours, however, BAL’s price dropped by 8%, from $15. And today’s price is almost a third of its all-time-high price of $37.86, which traders reached on August 30.

Balancer is an automated market maker protocol that makes it cheaper to trade cryptocurrencies and reshuffle your crypto portfolio than on centralized exchanges. 

BAL is its governance token, meaning its holders can vote on governance proposals or, more likely, sell it on secondary markets—the practice of vacuuming up all of these tokens is known as yield farming. 

Ren, which trades as REN on exchanges, rose 9% following the listing, from $0.21 to $0.23. Trading volumes also rose from $83 billion to $101 billion. But its price also fell today overall, also by 8%. 

Ren powers a protocol that lets blockchains talk to each other. This protocol powers renBTC, an Ethereum token that represents Bitcoin.