Balancer Proposes Wind-Down After Restructuring Fails to Revive Revenue

Balancer, a decentralized exchange and automated market maker, has proposed winding down its operations due to its restructuring efforts failing to generate enough revenue.

The proposal was authored by Balancer Labs CEO Marcus Hardt and published on the Balancer governance forum on Monday. It calls for an orderly wind-down of the protocol and the distribution of its remaining treasury, currently worth more than $9 million, to BAL tokenholders.

Data from DefiLlama shows that Balancer's monthly protocol revenue fell to $371,000 in November from $1.13 million in October after a $128 million exploit affecting composable stable pools on its legacy v2 protocol.

According to Hardt, the November 2025 exploit hit legacy v2 pools and made traction harder to build for Balancer's new architecture, v3. He also stated that he underestimated how much the exploit would continue to limit adoption.