On October 30, most Balancer pools went withdrawals-only.
The DAO’s own “Closing the Books” list of leftover assets tells a different story about the shutdown: the governance payloads behind it show what was actually turned off, and one DAO-owned position that wasn’t.
Most coverage of Balancer’s shutdown describes an “orderly exit.” It largely is. But the shutdown has two parts. One is what happened to users’ pools on October 30. The other is the DAO collecting the scattered assets it still owns before BAL holders can redeem.
On October 23, Balancer contributor mendesfabio posted “Closing the Books on Balancer DAO-Owned Assets.” It lists what the DAO still holds and what will happen to each item.
Let’s compare that list with the payloads the DAO’s multisig is executing and with the DAO’s own wallets on-chain. Most of it is in order. One position, the DAO’s liquidity in the Ethereum v3 buffers, was still changing value as the cutoff arrived. Another, worth about $70,000, is still waiting to be burned.
What Changed On October 30
The wind-down was approved under BIP-928, “Orderly Winddown of Balancer and Distribution of the Treasury.” Its rules for the cutoff are short:
- Pools that can be paused are paused and become withdrawals-only.
- Pools that can’t be paused keep running, with the protocol fee set to zero “where the contracts allow it.”
- Where a pool’s contracts require it, recovery mode is turned on so withdrawals stay open.
- v3 pools that partners asked to keep open stay live until November 30, when the v3 Vault itself is paused.
The technical work is set out in BIP-936, whose Ethereum payloads are published in Balancer’s multisig-ops repository. They do three things:
- Disable 25 pool factories on Ethereum mainnet. These cover v2 stable and composable-stable pools and nearly every v3 pool type, including weighted, stable, StableSurge, Gyro, ReCLAMM, QuantAMM and liquidity-bootstrapping pools. No new pools can be created from them.
- Give an operator address the power to pause pools. For v2 pool types, this includes
pause()andenableRecoveryMode(). For v3, it ispausePoolon the v3 Vault’s admin contract. - Set v2 protocol fees to zero. The default swap-fee and yield-fee percentages in the protocol-fee provider are set to zero, so v2 pools that keep running no longer earn the DAO anything.
So the cutoff closed pool creation, paused what could be paused, and ended protocol fee income. It did not cover the assets on the DAO’s own list.
The Ledger The DAO Published
The “Closing the Books” post lists each item and what will happen to it. Here is where each one stands as of October 31:
Already moved:
- Innovation Fund: about 92,822 USDC and 25.58 WETH returned to the managed Treasury.
- Grants Safe: 1,569.17 BAL, 5,600 USDC and 0.984 WETH, about $8,500, returned in an executed Safe transaction.
- Gas station: in an update on October 30, the DAO reported moving 40 ETH from its gas station to the managed Treasury in this transaction. A small balance stays behind to pay gas for the rest of the wind-down.
Still pending:
- Timeless fees: about 10,000 USDC.
- stkAAVE rewards: about 9.3061 AAVE.
- v3 buffer liquidity: about $350,000.
- BEETS on Sonic: 10 million BEETS.
The Innovation Fund figure lines up with BIP-928’s own accounting. The proposal’s September 20 update valued the fund at $155,692. At the roughly $2,200 ETH price of this week, 92,822 USDC plus 25.58 WETH is worth about $149,000. The small gap is consistent with the ETH price falling since the September snapshot.
The Buffer Is Still Moving
The buffer position is different from everything else on the list.
Balancer v3 buffers hold liquidity that helps route swaps through yield-bearing tokens. According to the post, the DAO’s share sits “in internal Vault accounting,” not as tokens in a wallet. The author calls the withdrawal “time-sensitive” because “balances shift as swaps pass through the buffers.”
The two published figures show it has already shrunk:
- September 20 (BIP-928 table): “v3 buffers, owned by the Treasury Safe” were valued at $397,709.
- October 23 (Closing the Books): about $350,000.
That is a drop of roughly $48,000, or about 12%, in just over a month. It is also the largest single item on the list.
The October 30 cutoff doesn’t stop this by itself. BIP-928 keeps partner-requested v3 pools live until November 30, and buffer balances move whenever swaps route through them. The DAO’s buffer value can keep changing until the Treasury Council withdraws it, or until the v3 Vault pauses. The post says the Council is arranging a signing session for the withdrawal.
Claims Written Into BIP-933 And BIP-935
The two smaller claims are already written as executable payloads, so the amounts are fixed in code.
BIP-933 calls claimFees on the Timeless veBAL grant contract (0x89f6…16f6). It claims USDC from Balancer’s FeeDistributor and sends it straight to the DAO multisig. The forum post estimates about 10,000 USDC left over after the Timeless position was unwound.
BIP-935 calls claimRewards on the stkAAVE contract and sends exactly 9.306104517152944285 AAVE to the Treasury Safe. That matches the “~9.3061 AAVE” in the asset review.
Both payloads passed Tenderly simulations in Balancer’s ops repository. Neither depends on any pool being live, so the October 30 cutoff doesn’t affect them.
The 10 Million BEETS Still Waiting To Be Burned
The BEETS position is visible directly on-chain, and it hasn’t moved.
As of October 31, the DAO’s Safe on Sonic, 0x4f22…3c2e, still holds exactly 10,000,000 BEETS. Sonicscan values the holding at about $70,055, or roughly $0.007 per token. It is the Safe’s only priced asset; the address holds no S tokens.
The burn proposal, listed alongside BIP-928 as BIP-934, would destroy the tokens rather than sell them or hand them out. The asset review said the vote was expected to go to Snapshot the weekend after October 23. A week later, the tokens are still in the Safe.
That makes the BEETS holding one of the larger items on the DAO’s list by dollar value. It is worth more than the Grants Safe and Timeless fees combined. It is also the only item designed to leave the books without reaching the treasury. Divided across the roughly 63 million redeemable BAL in BIP-928’s estimate, $70,000 comes to about a tenth of a cent per token. That is small, but it is a deliberate choice, and the vote decides it.
What The Cutoff Did Not Freeze
Putting the payloads, the ledger and the on-chain balances together gives a clear picture.
On October 30, Balancer disabled pool creation, paused the pools it could, and ended v2 protocol fee income. The DAO’s own leftovers were not frozen:
- Grants, Innovation Fund and gas-station ETH: already moved.
- Timeless USDC and stkAAVE rewards: claimable through payloads that don’t depend on any pool.
- 10 million BEETS: still on Sonic, worth about $70,000, waiting for a burn vote.
- v3 buffer liquidity: still changing value.
The amounts are small next to BIP-928’s estimated distributable base of about $9.96 million, which the September 20 update set at roughly $0.158 per BAL. Two items will still affect the final figure. The buffer has already lost about $48,000 and is still exposed to swaps, so the sooner the Treasury Council withdraws it, the better. The BEETS vote decides whether about $70,000 is burned or kept.
Disclosure: This is not trading or investment advice. Always do your research before buying any cryptocurrency or investing in any services.
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