April brought meaningful progress across the Aura and Balancer ecosystems. From cross-chain expansion to MEV capture and adaptive fees, the month was all about deeper alignment across protocols, incentives, and infrastructure.

Here’s a look back at what moved:

Balancer Alliance Program Approved

The Balancer community approved the Alliance Program, a new framework that allows protocols to receive a share of the fees generated by their pools. That share must then be converted into veBAL, giving protocols long-term governance power and the ability to direct emissions toward their own liquidity.

This creates a powerful incentive loop: protocols that deepen their liquidity on Balancer are rewarded with more influence over future emissions — and in turn can use that influence to sustain and grow their pools. Rocket Pool was the first to apply to the program, showcasing how protocols can begin aligning liquidity provisioning with long-term control and sustainability.

Balancer V3 Launches on Avalanche

Balancer V3 officially deployed on Avalanche, bringing its full suite of programmable liquidity tools to one of the fastest-growing chains in the RWA and DeFi space. This includes Boosted Pools (which deploy idle liquidity into yield strategies), Hooks (custom logic at key pool interaction points), and support for completely custom AMM types.

The move opens up new design space for Avalanche developers, who can now build and deploy advanced capital-efficient strategies directly on Balancer infrastructure. Institutional players already active on Avalanche — such as those working with tokenized treasuries or RWA platforms — can now tap into more flexible liquidity systems.

MEV-Cap Hook Goes Live

One of the most innovative releases this month was the launch of the MEV-Cap Hook on Balancer V3. On OP Stack chains like Base and Optimism, transactions are ordered by priority fee — the amount users pay to be processed faster. The MEV-Cap Hook uses that signal to dynamically adjust swap fees in real time.

When a transaction pays a high priority fee — often a sign of MEV activity — the hook increases the pool's swap fee accordingly, capturing part of that value and returning it to liquidity providers. This mechanism helps internalize MEV, transforming it from a drain into a direct yield source for LPs. It’s entirely onchain and composable, with no external fee routing or governance steps required.

Dynamic Fees with EZKL

Balancer also integrated EZKL, a zero-knowledge machine learning toolchain, to bring dynamic, adaptive swap fees to pools using verifiable offchain computation. Instead of relying on static fee settings, protocols can now use statistical models — such as volatility predictions — to calculate optimal swap fees and feed the result back onchain.

These models run offchain, but the results are submitted to Balancer along with a cryptographic proof that the computation was done correctly. This allows pools to adjust fees in real time based on market conditions, without sacrificing decentralization or requiring manual governance updates.

It’s a major step forward in creating responsive, efficient liquidity systems that still respect DeFi’s core trust assumptions.

AURA Accumulation for Strategic Emissions

Parallel Protocol’s Insurance Fund committed $480,000 toward purchasing AURA and locking it as vlAURA. By acquiring vlAURA, Parallel can direct incentives toward pools involving its key assets — such as PAR, paUSD, and PRL — supporting deeper liquidity and ensuring protocol-aligned rewards.

From infrastructure upgrades to protocol governance shifts, April marked real progress. Let’s see what May brings.