The Balancer cryptocurrency is the reward token that fuels the Balancer market maker protocol. The Balancer protocol serves as a liquidity provider and a non-custodial portfolio manager. Unlike other automatic market maker protocols, such as Uniswap, Balancer is designed to provide a general solution that can be customized for a variety of trading pools with different distributions. It uses smart order routing to send trades to trading pools with the best rates available, and rewards traders by paying them a fee for increasing the liquidity of these pools.

SushiSwap is a decentralized exchange protocol that emerged as a fork of UniSwap. The main difference being the SUSHI token which acts as a governance token and entitles holders to a percentage of the trading fees charged on the network. Both UniSwap and SushiSwap, use an automated market making (AMM) model, where liquidity providers add funds to liquidity pools. Unlike centralized, order book exchanges, token pairs are priced according to an equation in which multiplying the prices of the 2 tokens will always equal a constant.

PancakeSwap is a decentralized exchange built on the Binance blockchain. It allows users to stake their funds in return for the protocol’s tokens, and uses an automated market maker (AMM) model to enable users to trade BEP-20 tokens on the platform without an order book. PancakeSwap is similar to Uniswap and SushiSwap, and rewards users for depositing funds to the liquidity pool with PancakeSwap tokens that entitle holders to a portion of the trading fees generated on the platform.