Governance

Various components of Balancer Governance are described in brief below. Click on the headings for more details on each topic.

veBAL

veBAL (opens in a new tab) is a time-locked, non transferable derivative of the 80/20 BAL/ETH BPT on Mainnet (opens in a new tab). veBAL holders, also called Balancer Governors, vote on proposals relevant to the protocol. These proposals are wide, ranging from which pools to enable BAL incentivize for to how treasury funds are allocated and managed.

BAL Token

The BAL token is the primary component of veBAL. Due to the fact that veBAL allows for swapping between BAL and ETH, BAL liquidty scales with Governance. Due to the fact that veBAL liquidty is locked, the market can easily understandhow BAL liquidty depth will scale over time by analyizing the unlock schedule of veBAL.

Governable Protocol Fees

Balancer Governors have the power to enable and modify Governable Protocol Fees. These can be collected from swapping fees and flash loan fees and stored in the Vault. The Governors themselves also get to decide what becomes of these fees, and how to best spend them to support the health and progress of the protocol.

Governance Process

Changes to the Balancer Protocol and allocations of community funds are made through a governance process, which includes: A proposal, a prepaird transaction payload for onchain execution via gnosis-safe, and a snapshot vote validating the proposal with a quorum that currently stands at at least 2 million veBAL voting.

Snapshot

Snapshot, a spinoff of Balancer, is an off-chain gasless multi-governance client with easy to verify and hard to contest results. Balancer Governance Votes take place on Snapshot.

Multisig

To enact the off-chain votes on Snapshot, Balancer Protocol uses a Multisig to solidify these changes on-chain. Balancer’s Multisig signers are a diverse set of widely respected community members. The multisig does NOT have decision making power, as its role is to simply enact on-chain the decisions BAL holders make via off-chain voting.

Emergency subDAO

In order to protect veBAL from bad actors by killing gauges and pool factories, the emergency subdao was established with bounded authority to manage the protocol.