Balancer holders to vote on winding down the protocol and paying out the treasury

Snapshot Vote and Shutdown Timeline @Balancer has posted a governance proposal to wind down its protocol entirely and return what remains in its treasury to $BAL holders. A Snapshot vote is scheduled for September 25 to 29, with a quorum of 5 million BAL. The outcome will determine whether the project proceeds with an orderly closure after years of mounting financial pressure. All Balancer pools would transition to a withdrawals-only phase starting October 30, 2026.Official contributor work wraps up a day later, on October 31. The proposal, authored by Marcus Hardt and posted to the Balancer governance forum, cancels the buyback program approved under BIP-919 in April and replaces it with a burn-to-redeem structure. Under the new plan, BAL holders destroy their tokens and receive a pro-rata share of whatever sits in the protocol's coffers. The proposal asks for a winddown budget of $150,000 from November 1 to May 2027, $30,000 from then to a final sweep, and a $220,000 reserve drawn only if needed, totalling $400,000.Redemption runs in two rounds and a sweep. Round one opens at the end of May 2027 at an announced and audited snapshot block and stays open six months to the end of November 2027, with holders burning BAL to receive their share of the treasury in the tokens the DAO holds.Round two lands within two months of that close, at the end of January 2028, as an airdrop to addresses that redeemed in round one.Addresses that skipped round one get nothing. The timing is set to coincide with the expiration of veBAL locks. The proposal excludes BAL itself from the distribution, so redeemers would receive the other assets the DAO holds, in kind and pro rata. Revenue Collapse and a Troubled Recent History The numbers behind the proposal are stark. Monthly costs run at around $150,000 against protocol revenue of roughly $30,000 in August, down from about $97,000 in June. The managed treasury is at least $9 million at current prices, citing the figure reported by treasury manager kpk.BAL's market capitalisation is $7.71 million, according to CoinGecko, meaning the treasury is currently worth more than the entire token supply. The November 2025 exploit drained approximately $110 million in digital assets from Balancer v2 pools, dealing severe reputational and liquidity damage from which the protocol never fully recovered. Balancer Labs, the corporate entity that incubated and funded the protocol, subsequently announced it would shut down.A prior restructuring under BIP-918 consolidated all operations under Balancer OpCo Limited, right-sized the team to 12.5 FTE, and established an annual operating budget of $1.9 million, a 34% reduction from the prior level. That plan also set a review trigger if DAO revenue fell below $60,000 a month for three consecutive months.