Balancer holders approved a wind-down. Here are the pool exit dates, withdrawal options, rejected fork and timeline for redeeming BAL.
Balancer holders have approved an orderly shutdown, with more than 99% of the roughly 17.2 million BAL cast backing the plan. The protocol is now moving from an operating exchange toward a withdrawal window and a treasury distribution for token holders.
The practical part is a set of dates. Most pausable pools will move to withdrawals only on October 30, 2026. Certain v3 pools may remain active for longer, while the first window for exchanging BAL for a share of the treasury won't open until the end of May 2027.
On October 30, pausable pools will become withdrawal-only, meaning users can leave but can no longer trade or add liquidity. The bug bounty also ends that day and will no longer exist afterward.
Partners that are still moving v3 liquidity can request an extension by October 16. Those pools can remain live through November 30, when the v3 Vault is scheduled to be paused.
That extension comes with a tradeoff. The extended v3 pools won't have bug bounty coverage after October 30. Liquidity providers were told to exit by that date if they want to leave while coverage remains available.
The schedule works like this:
Pools that can't be paused will keep working. Where their contracts allow it, their protocol fees will be set to zero. For pausable pools that require it, recovery mode will be activated when the pause begins so withdrawals can stay open.
The wind-down proposal says a final list showing which pools can and can't be paused will be published before October 30. Until that list appears, users don't have a verified, pool-by-pool exit schedule.
The shutdown doesn't lock liquidity providers out. Their funds are meant to remain withdrawable throughout the exit window.
Balancer says its contracts are non-custodial, so a withdrawal doesn't depend on Balancer or another team continuing to operate. That's a useful distinction: the protocol can wind down without taking custody of the assets users have already deposited.
Still, the plan asks liquidity providers to plan their exits during the window. The absence of dependence on the Balancer team isn't the same as advice to wait. Pools that stay active for longer can still expose providers to contract risks after bounty coverage ends.
Balancer's v2 and v3 pools held about $52.4 million combined on the day the vote closed, according to Unchained. That is the pool liquidity the shutdown schedule is designed to unwind.
Voters also rejected BIP-929, the proposal to fork the protocol, with about 70% voting against. That vote settles the next phase: there won't be an official fork keeping the existing pools running under the rejected plan.
The fork came from MAXYZ, a team led by longtime Balancer contributors Gosuto and Zekraken. It would have kept pools operating until the end of the second quarter of 2027. It also called for the new entity to receive up to about 6 million non-circulating BAL, then worth roughly $690,000, in exchange for 10% of the fork's token supply or equivalent value.
The rejected proposal offered more time, but it also introduced a new entity and a new allocation from the Balancer treasury. Voters chose the existing wind-down plan instead.
After existing veBAL locks expire, the treasury will be distributed in kind and in proportion to the BAL redeemed. In the first round, holders burn BAL to claim their share.
Former Balancer Labs CEO Marcus Hardt, who wrote the plan, estimated a distributable treasury of about $9.96 million against 63.07 million redeemable BAL. That works out to $0.1579 per BAL, but Hardt described the calculation as his own unaudited measurement.
The amount isn't final. The governing treasury figure and per-token payout will be measured and audited when the snapshot opening round one is taken. The exact snapshot date hasn't been published, although the proposal says it will be announced at least two weeks beforehand.
There are two rounds and a final sweep:
Holders who don't redeem in round one receive no share in round two. They also won't receive new BAL. What they get from the treasury distribution doesn't represent or resolve into BAL.
Wrapped and locked BAL positions need extra steps. veBAL voters use the BAL underlying their lock at face value, and each existing lock eventually unlocks into an 80/20 BAL/WETH BPT. The pool remains exitable, allowing the position to be turned back into BAL and redeemed.
BAL held through sdBAL or auraBAL must be unwound before round one closes. tetuBAL holders will receive BAL equal to either 50% or 100% of their amount, depending on which Snapshot option received more votes. The brief doesn't confirm which option won.
The shutdown was proposed on September 14 after Balancer Labs announced in March that it would close following a November 2025 exploit that drained about $128 million from v2 pools.
The economic pressure was already visible. Hardt cited roughly $150,000 in monthly costs against about $30,000 of protocol revenue in August. The proposal also says most protocol revenue still comes from v2 because v3 revenue hasn't grown enough to replace it.
The exploit affected the legacy v2 pools, while v3 uses a different architecture. But the proposal says the event followed the Balancer name into public discussions and made rebuilding momentum harder.
The approved plan sets aside $150,000 for wind-down spending from November 1, 2026, to May 2027. A further $30,000 is budgeted through the final sweep, with a $220,000 reserve available if needed.
The long-term design is simple: fewer privileges and less dependence on the team. The DAO intends to give up its own privileged roles, including the mainnet multisig and Emergency subDAO. Governance will separately vote on transfers of code, licences, deployments and other assets rather than handing them over automatically.
For users and liquidity providers, the important part isn't the long-term administrative design. It's the order of operations: know whether your pool can be paused, withdraw before coverage ends if you want it, and don't mistake the May 2027 treasury claim for another tradable BAL balance.
Morgan Stanley's new lab will test stablecoins, tokenized deposits and DeFi vaults away from core systems, with no client product announced.
House Oversight seeks trading and identity records from Hyperliquid, Crypto.com and PredictIt's owner as it examines prediction-market safeguards.
Sentora wants to run Aave V4 lending markets on Ethereum and split revenue evenly with the DAO. The proposal has no live deployment or demand data.
AAVE
ETH
