A Balancer governance vote that closed on Tuesday approved winding down the decentralized exchange. The plan moves pools that can be paused to withdrawals only at the end of October and pays out what is left of the treasury to BAL holders starting in May 2027. In a second vote that closed at the same time, holders turned down a proposal to launch an official fork of the protocol.
The wind-down proposal, BIP-928, passed with more than 99% of the roughly 17.2 million BAL cast. The fork proposal, BIP-929, failed with about 70% against.
“The vote has now closed,” former Balancer Labs CEO Marcus Hardt, who wrote the wind-down plan, posted on the governance forum. “With that, the orderly winddown described in BIP-928 is approved and we will move into execution.”
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Deadlines for Liquidity Providers
On Oct. 30, pools that can be paused switch to withdrawals only, and bug bounty coverage ends for every pool. Partners still moving v3 liquidity can request an extension by Oct. 16, which keeps those pools live through Nov. 30. Hardt wrote in a forum update on Sept. 24 that withdrawals “stay open throughout,” and told liquidity providers in those extended v3 pools to exit by Oct. 30 if they want out while still covered.
Balancer’s v2 and v3 pools still held about $52.4 million combined on Tuesday, DefiLlama data for v2 and v3 shows.
Hardt’s Estimate: About 16 Cents per BAL
The treasury goes out in kind and pro rata. Holders burn BAL to claim their share during a six-month window that opens at the end of May 2027, after existing veBAL locks expire. In a Sept. 20 update, Hardt put the distributable treasury at about $9.96 million against 63.07 million redeemable BAL, or $0.1579 for each BAL, which he called “my own measurement, not an audited figure.” The final figure will be set, and audited, at the snapshot that opens the claim.
The rejected fork came from MAXYZ, a team led by longtime Balancer contributors Gosuto and Zekraken. It would have kept pools running until the end of the second quarter of 2027 and granted the new entity up to about 6 million non-circulating BAL, worth roughly $690,000 when the fork was proposed. In return, the Balancer treasury would have received 10% of the fork’s token supply, or equivalent value, if the fork ever launched a token or had another exit event.
Hardt proposed the wind-down on Sept. 14, pointing to about $150,000 in monthly costs against roughly $30,000 of protocol revenue in August. Balancer Labs, the protocol’s corporate entity, announced in March that it was shutting down after a November 2025 exploit drained about $128 million from v2 pools.
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