Bancor is an on-chain liquidity protocol that allows its users to receive a share of the fees that pass through the pool they are providing liquidity to. It was launched in 2017 by Guy and Galia Benartzi and picked the name as a reference to John Maynard Keynes who tried to conceptualize a supranational currency, bancor.
The Bancor network is built on both Ethereum and EOS chains and operates as an automated market maker (AMM). It provides liquidity to niche crypto markets with the help of oracles. The prices of tokens in the pools are reported from the outside of the network and allow the proportion of the said tokens to be adjusted accordingly. BNT is an intermediary token and must be deposited into each pool in order to trade other tokens, as the liquidity of the pools increases, the demand for the token does too. In the future, it is also planned to give the BNT holders the opportunity to participate in governance processes.
In November 2021, the Bancor Network announced a new update, Bancor 3, which will be launched in three stages. The new upgrade will include Instant Impermanent Loss Protection, auto-compounding dual rewards, Omnipool, Infinity Pools, Single-Hop trades, and liquidity direction.