Balancer plans to "relaunch" via a new protocol fork, betting on on-chain trading of tokenized stocks.

The Balancer community has proposed a "Fork and Reincarnate" plan, designed to continue Balancer’s technology and ecosystem via an official fork in the event the original protocol faces potential shutdown, with the new protocol positioned as a tokenized stock trading platform. The proposal suggests MAXYZ lead the establishment of a new official fork entity, migrating part of Balancer’s liquidity, team members, partners, users, and intellectual property to the new protocol, while extending the suspension deadline for existing pools and the Balancer Vault to Q2 2027. For funding, the plan allocates Balancer’s remaining ~6 million uncirculated BAL tokens as seed capital for the new project, valued at roughly $690,000 at current prices. In exchange, if the new protocol conducts a future token issuance or other liquidity exit events, the Balancer Treasury will receive 10% of the new protocol’s token’s fully diluted valuation (FDV) upfront. The new protocol will leverage Balancer’s core technologies—including multi-asset pools, dynamic weights, dynamic fees, LVR capture, and permissioned pools—focusing on tokenized stocks and other traditional financial assets on-chain. Using the U.S. stock market’s average daily trading volume of $750 billion as a benchmark, the proposal estimates that if 10% of that volume moves on-chain, with a 1 basis point fee and 1% market share, theoretical annual revenue would reach approximately $27.4 million. Additionally, the proposal intends to grant the new fork a permanent, irrevocable, non-exclusive license for Balancer-related intellectual property; if the original Balancer entity is dissolved, this license will be upgraded to an exclusive assignment of the held intellectual property.