Balancer Co-Founder Proposes Phasing Out the Protocol, Says v3 Revenue Growth Fell Short of Expectations

Odaily Report: Balancer Labs co-founder Marcus Hardt posted on X that he has proposed a governance proposal to gradually shut down Balancer. Balancer had previously completed a restructuring, including halting token emissions, transferring all protocol fees to the DAO, cutting the operational budget by one-third, and reducing the team from approximately 25 people to 12.5 full-time equivalents.

Marcus stated that the restructuring was completed on the cost side as planned, but revenue performance fell short of expectations. Currently, most of Balancer's protocol revenue still comes from v2, and v3 revenue has not grown enough to replace v2. Previous security incidents have also continued to affect partners' willingness to adopt v3. Marcus said he can no longer see a funded path that could change the situation, and continuing to burn through treasury funds is not reasonable. Therefore, he has proposed gradually shutting down Balancer and will not lead efforts to develop a plan for continued operations. The Balancer code will remain open source, and other teams can fork it and continue development. The relevant proposal has been submitted to the governance forum, and the final decision still rests with token holders.