What are the advantages of POL compared to traditional liquidity pools?

POL (Protocol-Owned Liquidity)

Protocol-Owned Liquidity (POL) refers to liquidity controlled directly by the protocol. Compared to traditional liquidity pools, POL offers the following advantages:

• Greater Liquidity Stability: Traditional liquidity pools rely on external users to provide tokens for maintaining liquidity. Users may withdraw liquidity due to market volatility, yield changes, or other factors, leading to instability. POL allows DeFi protocols to directly own and control liquidity, reducing dependence on third-party liquidity providers and ensuring permanent liquidity. This avoids sudden liquidity drops caused by investor withdrawals and enhances price stability and market depth.

• Reduced Risk of Impermanent Loss: In traditional liquidity pools, asset price fluctuations may expose liquidity providers to impermanent losses. POL mitigates this risk by enabling protocols to better manage asset allocation and reduce losses from price swings, thus increasing participation incentives and attractiveness.

• Sustainable Incentive Mechanism: Traditional liquidity mining often requires issuing large amounts of tokens to incentivize liquidity providers. While this may be effective short-term, it can dilute token value over time and harm sustainability. POL eliminates reliance on high-yield incentives, allowing projects to focus on sustainable growth instead of attracting short-term participants with aggressive token rewards.

• Autonomous Governance and Strategy: Traditional liquidity pools are influenced by the actions and decisions of external liquidity providers, making it difficult to adapt quickly to market changes. POL gives protocols greater control over liquidity settings and allocation, enabling dynamic adjustments to parameters such as lock periods and allocation ratios, thus aligning liquidity management with the protocol’s strategic goals.

• Enhancing Ecosystem Decentralization: POL reduces dependence on centralized liquidity providers (such as market makers), enabling projects to operate more independently and distribute decision-making power across a broader group of stakeholders. This fosters decentralized development within the DeFi ecosystem.

• Optimized Incentive Distribution Model: Using Berachain’s POL model as an example, validators, applications, and deeply engaged users are rewarded for contributing to the ecosystem’s long-term growth and health. Users who supply POL to the ecosystem receive governance token rewards (e.g., BGT) and can delegate these tokens to validators to earn additional incentives from multiple applications. This reward distribution structure is more sustainable than traditional liquidity mining, which relies heavily on transaction fee sharing.