In brief
- BAL holders approved an orderly wind-down of Balancer with more than 99% of the votes cast, and rejected a rival plan for an official fork.
- Pools that can be paused switch to withdrawals only on 30 October, when bug bounty cover also ends; extended v3 pools close on 30 November.
- The treasury goes to BAL holders from the end of May 2027, currently measured at about $0.158 per BAL, an unaudited figure.
The decentralized exchange Balancer is shutting down. A governance vote that closed on 29 September at 18:00 UTC approved BIP-928, the plan to wind down the protocol and hand what is left of its treasury to BAL holders. About 17.09 million of the 17.23 million BAL cast backed it, spread over 42 votes.
A second proposal, BIP-929, failed with about 70% against. It came from MAXYZ, a team of longtime contributors, and would have kept pools running until the end of the second quarter of 2027 while an official fork took over. The fork would have received about 6 million non-circulating BAL, in return for 10% of its own token supply if it ever launched one.
What liquidity providers need to do
The proposal thread sets the dates. Partners that need more time to migrate a v3 pool must ask by 16 October. On 30 October, pools that can be paused move to withdrawals only and bug bounty coverage ends for every pool. Pools that cannot be paused keep working, with the protocol fee set to zero where the contracts allow it. The extended v3 pools run until 30 November, when the v3 Vault is paused.
The contracts are non-custodial, so withdrawals stay open after these dates. The proposal’s author told LPs in extended v3 pools to exit by 30 October if they want to leave while the bug bounty still covers them.
How much BAL holders could get
From the end of May 2027, holders get six months to burn their BAL for a pro rata share of the treasury, paid in kind across roughly six tokens. A second round and a final sweep follow for those who redeemed. In a 20 September update to the same thread, the author put the distributable treasury at $9.96 million against 63.07 million redeemable BAL, or $0.1579 per token, calling it “my own measurement, not an audited figure.” The real number is set and audited at the snapshot that opens the claim.
BAL traded at $0.133 on CoinGecko at 00:36 UTC on 30 September, below that estimate and far from its $74.45 peak in May 2021.
The proposal gives money as the reason. The protocol costs about $150,000 a month to run, while revenue was about $30,000 in August, down from $97,000 in June. It also names the November 2025 exploit of legacy v2 pools, which drained about $128 million and led Balancer Labs to close its corporate entity in March, as a drag on growth, though not the main cause.
DefiLlama data, read by Cryptured at 00:36 UTC on 30 September, puts Balancer’s total value locked across v1, v2 and v3 at $58.5 million. That compares with $775 million on 2 November 2025 and a peak of $3.3 billion in November 2021.
The next date to watch is 16 October, when the list of v3 pools kept alive for partners starts to take shape. It must be published before 30 October.
