Balancer Labs Co-Founders: Balancer Labs to Sunset Gradually, Core Team to Join Balancer OpCo

BlockBeats News, March 24th, Balancer Labs co-founder Fernando Martinelli announced in a post to the community that he will gradually wind down Balancer Labs. The company, as the protocol's original incubation entity, has become a burden on the protocol's development due to ongoing legal risks from the November 2025 v2 exploit and a lack of revenue streams. Balancer Labs core team members will be integrated into Balancer OpCo (pending governance vote).

Fernando Martinelli stated that the protocol's total fee revenue over the past three months exceeded $1 million on an annualized basis, and it still has practical functionality. The main issues lie in the tokenomics and high cost structure. The following measures will be taken: reducing BAL emissions to zero; terminating the veBAL model; routing 100% of protocol fees to the DAO treasury and reducing the V3 protocol fee split to 25% to attract organic liquidity; providing a buyback mechanism for BAL holders to smoothly exit liquidity; focusing on core products such as reCLAMM, LBP, stablecoin / LST pools, weighted pools, and a few EVM chains. After the shutdown, he will no longer have a formal relationship with the protocol but is willing to provide support in an advisory capacity.