May was a month of alignment turned action. Protocol upgrades, capital strategies, and liquidity launches came together across the Aura and Balancer ecosystems—deepening flywheels and expanding reach.
The Balancer Alliance framework approved in April officially went into effect. For the first time, external protocols can now earn a share of swap fees from their pools—provided they convert those earnings to 80/20 BAL/WETH and permalock as veBAL.
That structure doesn't just align incentives. It creates sustained buy pressure on BAL, which in high-volume periods could exceed the rate of BAL emissions. Alliance partners are now rewarded in governance power and emissions influence for deepening liquidity.
Following last month’s Avalanche deployment, several capital-efficient pools went live:
savUSD / USDT
AUSD / USDT / USDC
sAVAX / ggAVAX / WAVAX
AUSD / USDC / savUSD
These pools reflect Balancer V3’s flexibility, enabling efficient stablecoin routing and yield-bearing AVAX exposure—all on a fast, RWA-friendly chain.
QuantAMM launched its blockchain-traded fund architecture on Balancer V3, offering permissionless access to actively managed strategies. Each QuantAMM pool is designed around a rules-based investment thesis—like momentum or macro trend-following—and adjusts composition automatically based on live market data.
This unlocks a new use case for programmable liquidity: onchain asset management.
A new walkthrough showcased how the MEV-Cap Hook works in practice. By detecting high-priority transactions (often MEV-related), the hook increases swap fees in real time to capture a portion of that alpha for LPs.
Unlike offchain bots or passive defenses, this mechanism is fully composable and lives inside the pool itself. As Balancer infrastructure evolves, yield extraction becomes yield capture.
AIP-74: Sunsetting Fraxtal Pools proposes sunsetting Aura’s Fraxtal deployment due to low usage and operational overhead. If passed, all Aura pools on Fraxtal will be phased out, with incentives removed and users encouraged to migrate.
Supplemental Ecosystem Fund Proposal seeks to top up the Aura Ecosystem Fund, ensuring continued grants and partnerships through 2025.
From fee-aligned liquidity loops to programmable funds and MEV-native infrastructure, May showed the real power of modular DeFi. June’s already lining up to keep the momentum going.
