# Protocol Overview ## What is Balancer? Balancer is a decentralized protocol that provides DeFi liquidity infrastructure. Balancer’s mission is to accelerate innovation in DeFi by providing access to **secure infrastructure for liquidity applications**. Projects build on Balancer to create new, innovative types of pools and financial dApps. Balancer Pools contain two or more tokens that traders can swap between. Liquidity Providers put their tokens in the pools in order to collect swap fees. Balancer adopts powerful features to slash gas costs, super-charge capital efficiency, unlock arbitrage with zero-token starting capital, and open the door to custom AMMs. ## Revolutionary DeFi Liquidity Pools Pools with high token counts are conceptually similar to Index Funds in traditional finance. They allow users to have access to broad exposure to a variety of tokens. Where Balancer differs from the traditional notion of an index fund, however, is in the fees. **Instead of paying fees** to have a broker rebalance the pool, the **pools collect fees** as they're continuously rebalanced by traders making swaps. Furthermore, high token-count pools have the advantage of having many token pairs, creating additional opportunities to collect trading fees. Balancer's WeightedPools are based on an [N-dimensional invariant surface](https://balancer.finance/whitepaper/), a generalization of the constant product formula described by Vitalik Buterin. ## Serving Everyone With this mechanism, the needs of both Liquidity Providers and Traders are served: * Liquidity Providers collect trading fees, while their portfolio is continuously rebalanced * Traders gain access to an open, decentralized exchange that never closes, allowing them to swap what and when they like for low fees --- # Agent Instructions: Querying This Documentation If you need additional information that is not directly available in this page, you can query the documentation dynamically by asking a question. Perform an HTTP GET request on the current page URL with the `ask` query parameter: ``` GET https://balancer.gitbook.io/balancer-v2/readme.md?ask= ``` The question should be specific, self-contained, and written in natural language. The response will contain a direct answer to the question and relevant excerpts and sources from the documentation. Use this mechanism when the answer is not explicitly present in the current page, you need clarification or additional context, or you want to retrieve related documentation sections.