Balancer Labs, the core team behind the decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol Balancer, has announced plans to wind down after a $116 million exploit that occurred in November.

 

The decision, according to CEO Marcus Hardt, was driven by the impact of the hack. Despite continuing to generate revenue, Balancer Labs’ economic model was no longer sustainable in the aftermath of the hack.

 

“We were spending too much to attract liquidity relative to what that liquidity was actually generating in revenue,” Hardt said. “We were diluting BAL holders to sustain a system that, in my view, was no longer serving the protocol well. At some point, you have to be honest about that.”

 

With Balancer Labs winding down its operations, the protocol is expected to be managed by the Balancer Foundation and its decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), an approach supported by co-founders Hardt and Fernando Martinelli. 

 

DAO members have been asked to vote on a proposal to restructure the protocol and its tokenomics. If approved, BAL emissions will end, all fees will be routed to the treasury, and the protocol’s share of swap fees will be reduced. The team size will also be cut.

 

So, while Balancer Labs, the core development team, is winding down, the protocol will continue operating under new management with a leaner structure.

 

 

The Balancer Protocol Exploit

On November 3, 2025, Balancer Protocol suffered a smart contract exploit targeting its V2 composable stable pools, resulting in the theft of significant amounts of cryptocurrency.

 

Although Balancer had a permission system in place, a bug in the smart contract allowed the attacker to bypass these controls. The attacker exploited the vulnerability to gain unauthorized access to the protocol’s shared vault system, enabling them to drain assets from multiple liquidity pools across different blockchains simultaneously.

 

The hack had a severe impact on Balancer, causing its total value locked (TVL) to drop from about $775 million to $258 million within days of the exploit, according to a report. Its native token, BAL, also fell by about 30%.

 

The shutdown of the Balancer Labs team comes weeks after crypto aggregator Step Finance announced its own shutdown following a January 31 hack that reportedly led to losses of between $26 million and $40 million from the protocol’s treasury.

 

Bunni, a decentralized liquidity protocol built on Uniswap V4, also shut down around October last year after suffering a hack that resulted in losses of about $8.4 million.