This implements an erc20 distribution scheme in which admin publish a merkle root of a token distribution and users can claim their tokens via merkle proofs.
Balancer has a weekly distribution of BAL tokens for liquidity providers. This process is called liquidity mining and its main objective is to distribute BAL governance tokens to stakeholders, achieving a healthy distribution in the space. The calculation of rewards due to each liquidity provider in v1 is calculated off-chain using these scripts: bal-mining-scripts
Initially, these tokens were distributed actively by Balancer Labs (disperse.app was used to send them) every Tuesday evening. Distributing BAL with an ERC-20 mass transfer was very gas intensive.
Allowing users to retrieve their own BAL reduces the overhead of the transfer of BAL tokens.
This repo contains a /merkle directory with smart contracts and a merkle tree library that powers the distribution, and /client that provides an interface to claiming BAL.
Liquidity Provider: As a balancer liquidity provider I earn tokens based on my contribution to my liquidity pools - so I navigate to balancer.exchange and click redeem to retrieve the tokens that are owed to me. This sends a transaction to a smart contract which sends the tokens I am owed to my account.
Balancer governance user: As a balancer employee, I need to send users their accrued BAL based on the value of tokens in their pools. I may want to restrict how long before a user can unlock their BAL
This method for distributing BAL will eventually be replaced with an on-chain distribution calculation in v2. v2 distributors