Overview
Balance Analytics is a free charting site that shows how evenly control of a blockchain network is spread among the operators who run it. Its interactive charts show which operators run many pools at once and how much stake those groups hold together1. Balance Analytics groups pools by the entity behind them, so one company running dozens of pools counts as one player, not dozens2.
Balance Analytics, also branded BALANCE, covers Cardano stake pools. The site charges nothing; supporters are asked to delegate ADA to the team's BALNC stake pool instead2. Founder Nicholas Gilbert and co-owner Christophe Garant run the project, and the Cardano Foundation selected BALNC for one of its delegations3. The site is also listed in the app directory on cardano.org under analytics4.
Key Features
- Compare stake across pool groups. The Group Stake v. Leverage chart plots each pool group's total stake against its leverage, the ratio of stake to pledge2, and highlights the groups in the minimum attack vector (MAV)1. The MAV is the smallest number of pool groups that together would hold more than half the stake2.
- One score for effective decentralization. The Average Resulting Decentralization chart tracks effective decentralization, a score that counts several pools run by one group as a single entity rather than many1.
- Watch decentralization change over time. An epoch slider, where each epoch is a five-day reward period, runs back to epoch 210; press play to watch the pool landscape shift1. Pool search follows a single pool or group through that history5.
- Slice the stake four ways. The Group Stake Donut redraws pool groups by stake, pledge, number of delegators, or number of pools6.
- Track ADA sitting outside staking. The UTxO Allocation charts follow ADA in five buckets, including never delegated, delegated to a retired pool, and ineligible7.
What to Expect
For curious ADA holders, Balance Analytics works a bit like a census of who controls the network's stake. You open a chart board, hover over a point to see a pool group's numbers, and scrub through epochs to see the trend5. The FAQ explains each measure in plain terms, including k-effective, a decentralization score that treats each group of pools as one entity2. The FAQ lists Google Chrome, on desktop and mobile, as the supported browser2.
For delegators comparing pools, the group view shows whether a pool belongs to a larger multi-pool operator, which complements stake pool explorers that list individual pool details1. The site also keeps an article library of pool landscape reports and pool group updates8, and offers an email newsletter and a Matrix chat room5.
For researchers and developers, the pool group list and MAV data are published as free JSON files, a simple machine-readable format2. The data comes from Cardano DB Sync, a tool that copies the full blockchain into a database2. Balance Analytics took over the pool group dataset after Cexplorer stopped maintaining it2. Its charts appear as references in CIP-50, a Cardano Improvement Proposal on pledge-based staking rewards9.
