Balancer Wind-Down Gets Dates: Pools Pause Oct 30, DAO Ends In 2027

Balancer's shutdown now has a calendar. A forum post published on October 20 turns the community's September vote into a list of dated steps. Pools begin to freeze on October 30, the main v3 vault stops a month later, and the DAO gives up its powers in June 2027. This Balancer wind-down is no longer a proposal in the abstract.

The vote behind the Balancer wind-down

The direction was settled on Snapshot. BIP-928 proposed an orderly winddown of Balancer and a distribution of the treasury. It closed on September 29 with 12.2 million votes behind the 50% tetuBAL option and 4.9 million behind the 100% option. Opposition came to 139,600 votes, or 0.81%. Quorum was 5 million and turnout reached 17.2 million.

Results page for BIP-928 on Snapshot. Source: Snapshot, Balancer space.

Both yes options count together, and the larger one fixes how much BAL goes to tetuBAL holders, so the 50% choice applies. The proposal says the treasury holds at least $9 million at current prices, based on figures from its manager kpk. Holders burn BAL to claim their share in kind, and a buyback approved earlier is cancelled.

What the October 20 post schedules

The implementation spec was posted on the Balancer forum by the maxyz.xyz account. It covers Ethereum, the only chain where governance has to approve the Balancer wind-down steps. On other chains the core team says it will act from its own multisigs.

Some actions start straight away. The DAO multisig is to disable the official v2 pool factories that allow it and grant pause rights over official pools to a deployer account. Official v3 factories get the same treatment.

On October 30 the deployer is to pause every pool still inside its pausable window and turn on recovery mode. Protocol swap and yield fees on v2 drop to zero that day. Nine partners that asked for more time get an extension, among them Parallel, Treehouse, Royco, Avant, Inverse, Rocket Pool, Blueberry, StakeWise and Neverland.

November 30 is the second deadline. The spec has the multisig pause the v3 vault and set global fees to zero, and partner pools are paused the same day. December 1 brings the revocation of all authorizer permissions except the default admin role.

The closing dates in the October 20 spec on the Balancer forum. Source: Balancer forum, Onchain Wind-down of Protocol: Specs.

The long tail

Redemption round one starts on May 31, 2027. The next day the multisig revokes the admin role and DAO governance ends. One awkward detail sits in the spec. The v3 vault unpauses by itself on May 12, 2029, and most pools follow later that year. The author calls that unavoidable, since the newest factories use a pause window of about 75 years.

A fork proposal ran alongside all this. BIP-929 failed on Snapshot, with 5.2 million for and 12.1 million against. A slimmer BIP-932, asking only for the DAO's blessing and no grant, passed with 5.5 million votes in favour and none against. The fork is to be independent of the BAL token and the DAO.

Anyone holding BAL should read the proposal terms before the redemption window opens, because the Balancer wind-down changes what the token can be redeemed for.