Governance
Balancer is governed by veBAL token holders who vote on protocol changes through Snapshot. On-chain operations are executed by Balancer Onchain Limited through its service provider MAXYZ. This section documents all governance components and processes.
Quick Start
Want to participate in governance?
- Acquire BAL tokens and WETH
- Deposit into the 80/20 BAL/WETH pool to receive BPT
- Lock your BPT on the veBAL page (1 week to 1 year)
- Vote on Snapshot proposals and gauge weights
Want to create a proposal?
- Draft an RFC on the Balancer Forum
- Engage with the community for feedback
- Work with the Operator team to prepare a transaction payload
- Submit to Snapshot (requires 200k veBAL delegation)
See the Governance Process for detailed steps and timeline requirements.
Various components of Balancer Governance are described in brief below. Click on the headings for more details on each topic.
Corporate Structure
As of BIP-882, Balancer operates through a formal corporate structure with Balancer Onchain Limited serving as the central hub for all on-chain operations. This structure provides legal clarity, operational efficiency, and proper risk management while maintaining alignment with decentralized governance.
Treasury Council
The Treasury Council oversees the Treasury Safe and administers the self-insurance fund. Established by BIP-882, it ensures ecosystem interests are protected by overseeing distributions, reviewing corporate resolutions, and ensuring alignment with Balancer governance decisions.
veBAL
veBAL is a time-locked, non transferable derivative of the 80/20 BAL/ETH BPT on Mainnet. 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 liquidity scales with Governance. Due to the fact that veBAL liquidity is locked, the market can easily understand how BAL liquidity depth will scale over time by analyzing the unlock schedule of veBAL.
Protocol Fee Operations
Protocol fees are collected from swaps, yield-bearing assets, and flash loans. This page describes how fees flow through Balancer's safe infrastructure—from collection via burners (V3) or Mimic (V2), through the Protocol Fees Multisig, to distribution among veBAL holders, core pool incentives, and the DAO. For fee percentages and distribution splits, see the Protocol Fee Model.
Governance Process
Changes to the Balancer Protocol and allocations of community funds are made through a governance process, which includes: A proposal, a prepared transaction payload for on-chain execution via Safe, and a snapshot vote validating the proposal with a quorum that currently stands 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
Balancer operates through a hierarchical safe system with clear separation of responsibilities. Top-level safes handle governance and treasury management, while operational multisigs execute day-to-day operations. The multisigs do NOT have decision making power - their role is to enact on-chain the decisions BAL holders make via off-chain voting.
Emergency subDAO
The Emergency subDAO is a 3-of-7 multisig (as per BIP-883) with bounded authority to protect the protocol by killing gauges, pausing pools, and managing pool factories in emergency situations.