Name Aura Finance Type Meta-g…Snapshot – 905 proposals, 1,0932 followers on 20 October 2026, last proposal AIP-78 Relate…/concepts/voting/vote-markets)

BIP-924: Balancer evicts the a…epts/analysis/how-daos-fail) . Balancer then voted to wind itself down. BIP-928 (https://snapshot.box/#/s:balancer.eth/proposal/0xeae4f8bab6f2fbfe22cfeae51ec336ef238c82e6e0017ee511ee67995235d53d) passed on 29 September 2026 and opens the first round of Balancer's own treasury distribution at the end of May 2027, after every existing veBAL lock, Aura's included, has expired. BAL held through a wrapper such as auraBAL redeems only if its holder has unwound it to BAL by the close of that round. The terms are on the Balancer DAO (/wiki/daos/dexs/balancer-dao) page.

How Caper approaches this Aur…directions. A caper puts the redemptionway out in the member's own hands. ExitLeaving a caper (/wiki/foundations/leaving-a-caper) is a unilateral call against something a member does alone rather treasury, not a proposal – no counterparty,han a proposal: no quorum, no wind-down vote, no unlock date. The condition is participation rather than duration: exit() requires a non-zero amount of the caper's soulbound vote tokens alongside the governance tokens, both withdrawn from the member's own account, and aborts without them, so the members who took part at all – byA member who has voted can exit any time for their fair share of the treasury. The right comes from taking part, since casting a ballot, the only act that mints the record exit spends – are the ones who can claim against it. A holder who has earned no record at all – never cast a ballot, however much they bought on the curve – has no exit to take, not a zero-valued ones is what earns it, and a holder who has never voted has no exit to take, however much they bought. That does not make Caper be…) for the wider design space.

How Caper approaches this Aur…ration: exit() requires a non-empty buckezero amount of the caper's soulbound vot…longside the governance tokens, both withdrawn from the member's own account, and aborts without them, so t…members who took part at all – by trading on the curve or by casting a ballot, each of whichthe only act that mints the record exit spends …rned no record at all – never traded on the curve, never cast a ballotcast a ballot, however much they bought on the curve – has no exit to take, not a …) for the wider design space.

How Caper approaches this Aur… so the members who took part in deciding whatat all – by trading on the curve or by casting a ballot, each of which mints the treasury was forcord exit spends – are the ones who can claim ag…) for the wider design space.

How Caper approaches this Aur…laim against it. A holder who never votedhas earned no record at all – never traded on the curve, never cast a ballot – has no exit to take, not a ze…) for the wider design space.

The bloc that outlived the pro…it a liability on the way out. The dispersal is now measurable rather than inferred, because totalSupply() on the locker can be read at any past block. At 24,844,800 – the block AIP-78 itself snapshotted, 9 April 2026 – vlAURA stood at 40,438,109.05, so the 17,171,688.83 that voted the protocol out of existence was 42.5% of the electorate that existed to vote. By block 25,758,271 (15 August) it was 332,317.70. By block 25,807,332, 22 August 2026 at 01:14:59 UTC, it was 7,804.22 – a fall of 97.7% in seven days as the last sixteen-week lock cohort ran out, and 0.0090% of AURA’s 86,413,430.86 supply. Nobody withdrew anything to make that happen; a vote-lock that is not renewed simply stops counting. The bloc at veBAL is unchanged and stays that way until 2027.

BIP-924: Balancer evicts the a…pened 14 August 2026 and closesd at 18:00:00 UTC on 18 August. Read off Snapshot that morning it carriesIt passed: 23,891,200.51 BAL for, 0 against, 0 abstain…00 BAL quorum, and unanimous. Barring a late reversal it passes, and the quorumThe final tally is identical to the standing read fifty minutes before the close, so not one address moved in the last window. The quorum accordingly halves to 5,000,000 BAL. It …epts/analysis/how-daos-fail) .

BIP-924: Balancer evicts the a…ned 14 August 2026 and closes at 18:00 UTC on 18 August. At the time of writRead off Snapshot that morning it carries 19,050,78223,891,200 BAL for, 0 against, from two0 abstaining, from seven voting addresses, against a – 239% of the 10,000,000 BAL quorum, and unanimous. Barring a late reversal it passes, and the quorum halves to 5,000,000 BAL. It does two things. It over… addresses – well short of 10m – though both would have cleared the 5m bar BIP-924 installs, by a comfortable 29%. A quorum calibrated around a…epts/analysis/how-daos-fail) .

AIP-78: eight addresses vote t…space has carried, out of 905. The shape it follows – a unanimous vote on a handful of addresses, authorising a redemption it cannot itself unwind – is the pattern set out under winding down a DAO (/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/analysis/dao-wind-downs) . The reasoning is unusually p… the end of a protocol's life.

Name Aura Finance Type Meta-governance / "liquid locker" – a vote-aggregation layer built on top of Balancer (/wiki/daos/dexs/balancer-dao) (DeFi, Ethereum + L2s) Governance token AURA – 0xC0c2…3DBF (https://eth.blockscout.com/address/0xC0c293ce456fF0ED870ADd98a0828Dd4d2903DBF) , vote-locked as vlAURA ( 0x3fa7…bcac (https://eth.blockscout.com/address/0x3fa73f1e5d8a792c80f426fc8f84fbf7ce9bbcac) ) Wrapped asset auraBAL – 0x616e…608d (https://eth.blockscout.com/address/0x616e8BfA43F920657B3497DBf40D6b1A02D4608d) , a liquid claim on permanently locked 80/20 BAL/WETH BPT Founded 2022 (contracts repo opened 1 February 2022 (https://github.com/aurafinance/aura-contracts) ) Status Winding down. AIP-78 (https://snapshot.box/#/s:aurafinance.eth/proposal/0x7f6c0d5a1577ca02c7cea36c82071bc1f453211279aa4b06887e9743898d241c) passed 12 April 2026; governance has ended, redemption stage 2 opens after the veBAL unlock on 29 April 2027 Governance venue aurafinance.eth (https://snapshot.box/#/s:aurafinance.eth) on Snapshot – 905 proposals, 1,093 followers, last proposal AIP-78 Related Balancer DAO (/wiki/daos/dexs/balancer-dao) , Convex Finance (/wiki/daos/lending/convex-finance) , Vote-escrow (/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/voting/vote-escrow) , Vote markets (/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/voting/vote-markets)

Aura Finance was Convex (/wiki/daos/lending/convex-finance) for Balancer (/wiki/daos/dexs/balancer-dao) : a protocol whose only product was other people's voting power. Depositors handed it BAL, it locked that BAL as veBAL and never unlocked it, and the resulting bloc steered Balancer's gauge weights on behalf of whoever held the second token. The lineage is not an analogy but a fork – Aura's own GitHub org still carries convex-platform (https://github.com/aurafinance/convex-platform) , forked from Convex's repository. It worked. By Balancer's own account Aura was responsible for "at least 60% (usually >75%) of the votes of every Snapshot proposal". Then Balancer decided to retire the vote-escrow (/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/voting/vote-escrow) system Aura was built on, and Aura – a protocol with no product of its own beneath the one it was layered over – voted to dissolve itself. What makes Aura worth a page is not the wind-down but its shape. Four months after its holders voted to shut it down, the position it accumulated is still the single largest bloc in Balancer's electorate, and it cannot be unwound until 2027. This is the part of dissolution (/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/analysis/council-dissolution) that governance design usually forgets: a lock outlives the organisation that took it out.

The bloc that outlived the protocol Every figure below is a direct eth_call against Ethereum mainnet at block 25,758,271 (15 August 2026, 05:11 UTC), not a dashboard reading. 80/20 BAL/WETH BPT locked by the Aura VoterProxy (https://eth.blockscout.com/address/0xaF52695E1bB01A16D33D7194C28C42b10e0Dbec2) 3,684,354.766 Its lock expiry (locked__end on veBAL (https://eth.blockscout.com/address/0xC128a9954e6c874eA3d62ce62B468bA073093F25) ) 1808956800 → 29 April 2027 Its veBAL balance 2,592,008.185 veBAL total supply 3,573,920.103 Aura's share of all veBAL 72.53% AURA total supply 86,413,430.86 vlAURA outstanding (vote-locked AURA) 332,317.70 – 0.38% of AURA Read the last two rows against the fifth. The electorate that nominally directs this bloc has almost entirely gone home: less than four tenths of one percent of AURA is still vote-locked, and the proposal evicting Aura (https://snapshot.box/#/s:balancer.eth/proposal/0xcf2a35f4ce5133b213d8b8e275cc93fec2894d9a0426b162712a00e59afdf6cf) notes that the locker itself has been shut. The stake it accumulated, meanwhile, is unchanged and immovable. A vote-escrow (/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/voting/vote-escrow) lock is a one-way commitment by construction, which is exactly what made it credible on the way in and exactly what makes it a liability on the way out.

auraBAL, still backed to within one BPT Aura's deposit token is the mechanism worth understanding, because it is what a liquid locker actually sells. Deposit BAL – strictly, the 80/20 BAL/WETH pool token that veBAL takes – and Aura locks it permanently and hands back auraBAL, a transferable claim on a position that will never be individually withdrawable. The depositor gets liquidity; the protocol gets a vote that never decays because it is never allowed to. The chain shows the accounting held to the end. auraBAL total supply at block 25,758,271 is 3,684,353.766; the BPT locked by the VoterProxy is 3,684,354.766. The difference is exactly 1.000 BPT – the seed unit – against a supply of 3.68 million. Whatever else the wind-down costs holders, it is not a shortfall between the token and the thing behind it. What the depositor cannot do is leave early. AIP-78 (https://snapshot.box/#/s:aurafinance.eth/proposal/0x7f6c0d5a1577ca02c7cea36c82071bc1f453211279aa4b06887e9743898d241c) is explicit that auraBAL "was expected to be permanently locked and now has almost no counter-trade liquidity", which is why the redemption is staged over a year rather than paid at once. The comparison with Convex's cvxCRV (/wiki/daos/lending/convex-finance) is instructive: same design, same permanence, and the same absence of any redemption path that does not route through the secondary market until the underlying protocol chooses to unwind.

AIP-78: eight addresses vote to dissolve AIP-78, "Orderly Protocol Wind-Down and Treasury Redemption for Aura" (https://snapshot.box/#/s:aurafinance.eth/proposal/0x7f6c0d5a1577ca02c7cea36c82071bc1f453211279aa4b06887e9743898d241c) , ran 9–12 April 2026 and passed 17,171,688.83 vlAURA for, 0 against, 0 abstain, on eight voting addresses. It is the last proposal the aurafinance.eth space has carried, out of 905. The reasoning is unusually plain for a governance document. Once Balancer moved to sunset veBAL, "the foundational mechanism that Aura was built on top of is potentially being retired … Without veBAL or with a watered down version, Aura's core value proposition ceases to function." The proposal adds the operator's arithmetic behind it: projected vlAURA yield had fallen below the cost of running the protocol, after BAL emission cuts, a price decline in both tokens, and the TVL withdrawal that followed the November 2025 Balancer exploit (/wiki/daos/dexs/balancer-dao) . The terms it set: - Stage 1, four weeks after passage. Withdrawal-only mode for LPs, AURA emissions off, the veBAL position begins to unwind, and 100% of treasury assets are redeemable pro-rata by AURA holders – who also receive a 1:1 auraRedeem token for the second stage. Treasury-held, ecosystem and unvested AURA are excluded from the calculation. - Stage 2, fifty-six weeks after passage. The veBAL lock expires, the underlying BPT is withdrawn, and 90% of it goes to auraBAL redeemers with 10% to auraRedeem holders, alongside any unclaimed stage-1 assets. - Estimated redemption: approximately $0.0226 per AURA, on the proposal's own figures. Aura also claimed 67.2% of Balancer's BIP-920 (https://snapshot.box/#/s:balancer.eth/proposal/0x133a531f0c0a428522e7791d7c099c9e8f5a17085ccf9bfc6ceee896365ee385) veBAL compensation airdrop – 336,074.19 of 500,000 USDC to the same VoterProxy – which AIP-78 routes to AURA holders in full. A wind-down vote by eight addresses redistributing a seven-figure position is a fair test of whether quorum design (/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/voting/quorum-and-threshold-design) is doing any work at the end of a protocol's life.

BIP-924: Balancer evicts the aggregator and halves its own quorum Aura's exit created a problem in the other direction, and Balancer is fixing it in public. BIP-924, "Exclude Aura from Governance and Reduce Quorum" (https://snapshot.box/#/s:balancer.eth/proposal/0xcf2a35f4ce5133b213d8b8e275cc93fec2894d9a0426b162712a00e59afdf6cf) , opened 14 August 2026 and closes on 18 August. At the time of writing it carries 19,050,782 BAL for, 0 against, from two voting addresses, against a 10,000,000 BAL quorum. It does two things. It overwrites the voting power of the Aura VoterProxy 0xaF52695E1bB01A16D33D7194C28C42b10e0Dbec2 to zero in the balancer.eth aggregator, so the underlying BAL becomes eligible again only as individual users redeem it after the 2027 unlock. And it halves the quorum from 10m to 5m BAL, on the stated ground that Aura's votes were capped in power but still counted toward quorum. That second clause is the interesting one, because Balancer had already been failing its own bar. BIP-922 (https://snapshot.box/#/s:balancer.eth/proposal/0xd56aaecd79ed7d00fdb8f25216e73494b2bfe635480d22c1556af422311a1965) and BIP-923 (https://snapshot.box/#/s:balancer.eth/proposal/0x1486a57ebdc0de5ab6482bf2e7aca9f82d75eff77d97cd8bbfce4bde4f55906a) both closed unanimously on 4 August 2026 with 6,473,256 and 6,454,723 BAL – on eleven and ten voting addresses – well short of 10m. A quorum calibrated around a participant that has left stops measuring participation and starts blocking it. Balancer's BIP-921 (https://snapshot.box/#/s:balancer.eth/proposal/0xeb3d43a0e527fb7bbe9f5090d52dcae336c8904aea6d0b0237b65862157bc208) had already moved the space from veBAL weighting to a 1-BAL-1-vote formula in May 2026; BIP-924 is the second half of unwinding the same experiment. For the wider pattern this belongs to – a governance parameter tuned to conditions that no longer hold – see quorum and threshold design (/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/voting/quorum-and-threshold-design) and how DAOs fail (/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/analysis/how-daos-fail) .

The documentation died before the protocol did Anyone researching this wind-down should know where the record actually is, because two of the three obvious places are gone. Checked 15 August 2026: - forum.aura.finance resolves to nothing. No A record. It is the discussion link on AIP-78 itself – the deliberation behind the wind-down vote no longer answers at its own address. The Internet Archive's last capture of the forum root is 18 May 2026, and the AIP-78 topic survives there (https://web.archive.org/web/20260508194226/https://forum.aura.finance/t/proposal-orderly-protocol-wind-down-and-treasury-redemption-for-aura/879) at 8 May 2026. - docs.aura.finance resolves to nothing either, though the GitBook source repository (https://github.com/aurafinance/aura-docs) is still public. - The code and the app are both still up. aura-contracts (https://github.com/aurafinance/aura-contracts) is MIT-licensed, unarchived, last pushed 13 May 2026, and app.aura.finance (https://app.aura.finance/) still serves the redemption interface. The ordering is the lesson, and it is not unique to Aura: the prose dies first, the code and the ledger outlive it. Cite the Snapshot space (https://snapshot.box/#/s:aurafinance.eth) , the contracts and the chain for anything load-bearing, and treat a project's own forum as the first thing to disappear. The same failure sequence is catalogued at DAO tooling discontinuity (/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/analysis/dao-tooling-discontinuity) .

How Caper approaches this Aura's members were never able to leave. Their capital was locked in a position only a collective vote could unwind, so when the reason for the lock disappeared the only available exit was a proposal to dissolve the whole protocol – and then a year of waiting for a timestamp. That is the structural cost of buying influence with a commitment device: the commitment is real in both directions. A caper puts the redemption in the member's own hands. Exit (/wiki/foundations/leaving-a-caper) is a unilateral call against the treasury, not a proposal – no counterparty, no quorum, no wind-down vote, no unlock date. The condition is participation rather than duration: exit() requires a non-empty bucket of the caper's soulbound vote tokens alongside the governance tokens and aborts without them, so the members who took part in deciding what the treasury was for are the ones who can claim against it. A holder who never voted has no exit to take, not a zero-valued one. That does not make Caper better at what Aura did – a caper has no gauge weights to sell and no vote market to run. It makes the failure mode different. Nothing in a caper can arrive at the position Aura is in, where the organisation has agreed to dissolve, the electorate has dispersed, and the treasury is still hostage to a lock until 2027. Compare rage-quit and exit rights (/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/membership/rage-quit-and-exit-rights) for the wider design space.

References - AIP-78 – Orderly Protocol Wind-Down and Treasury Redemption for Aura (https://snapshot.box/#/s:aurafinance.eth/proposal/0x7f6c0d5a1577ca02c7cea36c82071bc1f453211279aa4b06887e9743898d241c) (primary; Snapshot, aurafinance.eth, closed 12 April 2026). - BIP-924 – Exclude Aura from Governance and Reduce Quorum (https://snapshot.box/#/s:balancer.eth/proposal/0xcf2a35f4ce5133b213d8b8e275cc93fec2894d9a0426b162712a00e59afdf6cf) and BIP-921 – 1-BAL-1-Vote Reconfiguration (https://snapshot.box/#/s:balancer.eth/proposal/0xeb3d43a0e527fb7bbe9f5090d52dcae336c8904aea6d0b0237b65862157bc208) (primary; Snapshot, balancer.eth). - forum.aura.finance – the AIP-78 discussion thread (https://web.archive.org/web/20260508194226/https://forum.aura.finance/t/proposal-orderly-protocol-wind-down-and-treasury-redemption-for-aura/879) , via the Internet Archive (the live host no longer resolves). - On-chain, Ethereum mainnet at block 25,758,271: veBAL (https://eth.blockscout.com/address/0xC128a9954e6c874eA3d62ce62B468bA073093F25) , the Aura VoterProxy (https://eth.blockscout.com/address/0xaF52695E1bB01A16D33D7194C28C42b10e0Dbec2) , AURA (https://eth.blockscout.com/address/0xC0c293ce456fF0ED870ADd98a0828Dd4d2903DBF) , auraBAL (https://eth.blockscout.com/address/0x616e8BfA43F920657B3497DBf40D6b1A02D4608d) and the vlAURA locker (https://eth.blockscout.com/address/0x3fa73f1e5d8a792c80f426fc8f84fbf7ce9bbcac) . - aurafinance/aura-contracts (https://github.com/aurafinance/aura-contracts) and aurafinance/convex-platform (https://github.com/aurafinance/convex-platform) (the Convex fork Aura was built from).