We’re excited the Relay Token went live on the Bancor Network this week. This short post explores Bancor’s announcement in greater detail and explains how to use the Bancor Relay for your convenience.

Bancor recently announced the Bancor Network now makes SENSE

If this is your first time hearing about Bancor, this post will serve as the ideal primer to introduce and familiarize yourself with the protocol.

A Mission to Make SENSE

Before digging into what the Relay Token serves to do, it’s important to take a retrospective step back and to highlight the mission SENSE is undertaking, and the value pillars supporting that mission since the beginning.

SENSE is a utility token on the Ethereum blockchain with day 1 functionality described in the SENSE Whitepaper and comprises one smart contract for knowledge attribution and another smart contract for knowledge access.

More than three years ago, a small chatbot company was born with the ambitious mission to connect the world’s humans and to materialize a future where the limitless and untapped supply of humanity’s wisdom and lived experience could be freely accessible and most importantly, rewarded.

More than three million people illuminated the path for SENSE and a protocol for human intelligence, which attributes human knowledge across digital ecosystems and enables access to humans behind that attributed data without the need for intermediaries.

Our mission extends across all digital platforms where data and knowledge work regularly takes place, and this also holds true for other ecosystems powered by tokens on the Bancor Network.

The introduction of SENSE to the Bancor Network extends the mission forward, by building a bridge — in the form a Relay Token — to forge meaningful relationships between existing token ecosystems and the SENSE Network moving forward, while providing SENSE community members with all of the benefits implied in participation of the Bancor Network, including decentralized, continuous, and automated liquidity.

What is the Bancor Network?

Bancor is a decentralized liquidity network allowing every integrated token to be instantly converted for any other.

The Bancor Network provides an on-chain, fully decentralized solution for conversions between tokens in the network, through a low-cost, autonomous and adjustable liquidity mechanism.

BNT is the hub token that connected all tokens in the Bancor Network, allowing them to be easily convertible to each other thanks to their liquidity to BNT. BNT holds a connector balance in ETH (more on this below), making all the network’s tokens convertible to and from ETH, as well as any other token in the network.

The Bancor Protocol standardizes a new type of token that is natively liquid. These “Smart Tokens” are ERC20 compliant, by depositing to or withdrawing from their connector balances. Smart Token’s actually issue new supply units when purchased and remove units from circulation when sold, a new concept called Dynamic Supply.

You can think of these connectors like modules, programmed into a token’s design, and these modules are like accounts, owned by the Smart Token itself. Smart Tokens can be bought and sold for any of their connector tokens, and can issue new units when purchased while destroying units that are sold.

By holding a shared connected token balance in BNT, Smart Tokens in the Bancor Network are all purchasable and sellable for each other. These conversions happen directly through the Smart Token contracts, at continuously calculated rates, without needing to match buyers and sellers as in traditional or even decentralized exchanges.

What is a Bancor Token Relay Token?

A Relay Token is a unique Smart Token configuration which holds two connector token balances, one in BNT and one in any standard ERC20 token (such as SENSE).

This allows existing ERC20 tokens to be backwards compatible with the Bancor Protocol and be continuously liquid to any other token in the Bancor Network, via Relay Token, which functions like a gateway.

Because you can buy a Relay Token for one of its connected tokens, and immediately sell it for the other connected token, it functions as a conduit to allow non-Smart Tokens to be continuously and autonomously liquid.

Announcing the SENSEBNT Relay Token

This week, Bancor announced the SENSEBNT Relay Token, which enables SENSE to participate in the Bancor liquidity network, and by extension offers the ability to acquire SENSE Tokens using other utility tokens you may own.

Bancor’s functionality enables greater connectivity between the Ethereum network’s utility tokens and grants a higher degree of liquidity between overlapping networks, resulting in increased harmony across those networks.

The Bancor Protocol expresses its value proposition across six benefits: