How veBAL Works

How is veBAL different from veCRV?

There are a few modifications that set veBAL apart:

• Instead of locking pure BAL, users obtain veBAL by locking 80/20 BAL/WETH Balancer Pool Tokens (BPTs). This ensures that even if a large portion of BAL tokens are locked, there is deep trading liquidity.

• veBAL's maximum locking period is 1 year, a decrease from veCRV's 4 year period. The minimum locking period is 1 week. DeFi moves quickly, and in the event governance decides to use a new voting system, this allows for a shorter, but still sufficiently long, waiting period to transition.

Voting Power

All votes, whether on-chain or on Snapshot, consider veBAL voting power. In addition to typical DAO votes, veBAL is used to vote on Liquidity Mining Distribution with Gauges.

Voting power scales linearly with amount of BPT locked and with amount of remaining lock time.

Example

If a user locks 1 BPT of 80/20 BAL/WETH for the maximum time of one year, they will receive 1 veBAL; however, this veBAL quantity starts immediately decaying with time. If the user does not extend the lock period, this will decay to 0 after the year is complete, at which point the user can redeem their 1 BPT of 80/20 BAL/WETH.

Protocol Revenue Distribution

veBAL holders are entitled to a share of 75% of collected protocol fees. Users can collect their proportional share ($\frac{veBAL_{user}}{veBAL_{total}}$) after the fees are consolidated. Consolidation is a necessary step since protocol fees are collected as a wide array of tokens, and dividing up long tail assets for everyone could result in higher gas fees than token value in some cases.