Liquidity · Vaults · AURA
Aura is to Balancer what Convex is to Curve: it aggregates veBAL voting power to maximize Balancer gauge boosts, letting BAL/BPT holders earn boosted, auto-compounded rewards without locking BAL themselves.
Boosted Balancer yield and veBAL aggregation.
AURA price
$0.0185
-4.1% 24h
Latest data · 15 min delay
The dominant veBAL aggregator, steering Balancer emissions and underpinning the Balancer bribe market.
Liquid wrapper token minted when a user deposits the 80BAL-20WETH Balancer Pool Token (BPT) into Aura, which permanently locks it as veBAL. auraBAL is issued 1:1 for the underlying veBAL exposure and, unlike native veBAL, is transferable and tradable. Stakers earn a share of BAL revenue and veBAL fees plus AURA rewards, without maintaining the 1-year Balancer lock themselves.
Governance and vote-direction token obtained by locking AURA for 16 weeks. vlAURA holders vote every two weeks on which Balancer gauges receive BAL emissions, effectively steering the veBAL that Aura controls. A gauge must reach at least 0.1% of vlAURA voting supply to receive Aura-directed emissions.
Users deposit Balancer Pool Tokens into Aura reward pools to earn boosted BAL (from Aura's aggregated veBAL boost) plus additional AURA emissions, earned block-by-block, without individually locking BAL.
Meta-governance incentive marketplace integrated with Aura where protocols pay vlAURA voters to direct BAL emissions to their gauges. Aura 'core pools' route 65% of the fees they generate as voting incentives on Hidden Hand each two-week veBAL gauge cycle.
100,000,000 AURA (fixed), with 50% allocated to Balancer LP rewards and emissions tied to BAL earned on Aura
Aura Finance docs — $AURA Distribution2% of AURA supply allocated to the Balancer treasury (2-year vesting), a further 2% for veBAL bootstrapping incentives
Aura Finance docs — $AURA DistributionHow Aura maps onto established TradFi structures, and where it diverges.
Proxy-voting / voting advisory aggregator (e.g. an ISS-style bloc that pools shareholder votes)
Aura
Aura pools many participants' governance rights (veBAL) into a single large voting bloc and directs how a shared resource (BAL emissions) is allocated, much like a proxy advisor concentrates dispersed shareholder votes into influence over corporate decisions.
TradFi analogue
Aura's voting power is itself a tradable, incentivized market: votes are bought and sold openly via the Hidden Hand bribe market, holders are financially rewarded for delegating, and the entire process is on-chain and permissionless — unlike regulated, disclosure-bound proxy advisory.
Aura DAO / vlAURA governance
Governance Aura operates through community governance rather than a traditional corporate team. AURA is vote-locked into vlAURA, and Aura Improvement Proposals (AIPs) are decided by vlAURA holders. Early governance (first 16 weeks) allocated roughly 2% of supply across proposals AIP-1, 3, 5, 6 and 15.
Aura contributors
Core contributors / development Anonymous/pseudonymous core contributors received a 10% supply allocation on a 2-year vesting schedule. No tokens were distributed to insiders or VCs outside of protocol contributors.
Key milestones: launches, upgrades, exploits and governance events.
AURA Liquidity Bootstrapping Pool (LBP) launch
ExecutedAura launched via a five-day Balancer LBP paired with ETH (2.5% of supply for holder bootstrapping / ~2% in the LBP), bootstrapping token liquidity and governance distribution rather than a traditional VC raise. Just under 1.7M of a planned 2M LBP tokens were claimed.
SourceToken Generation Event (TGE) completed
ExecutedThe AURA TGE concluded on June 15, 2022, formally launching the protocol as a veBAL aggregator for the Balancer ecosystem.
SourceauraBAL Compounder audited (Halborn)
ExecutedHalborn completed a two-week audit of the auraBAL Compounder contracts (March 6-20, 2023), expanding Aura's auto-compounding functionality.
SourceSidechain / multi-chain expansion audited
ExecutedHalborn (May 9 - June 6, 2023) and Zellic (May 28 - June 6, 2023) audited Aura's sidechain and Convex-Platform-lite contracts, supporting Aura's expansion to Balancer deployments beyond Ethereum mainnet.
SourceAura is a protocol built on top of Balancer that aggregates BAL deposits and veBAL voting power to maximize incentives for Balancer liquidity providers and BAL stakers. It is widely described as 'Convex for Balancer' — the same veTokenomics-aggregation model Convex applies to Curve, applied to Balancer.
auraBAL is a liquid wrapper for veBAL. When you deposit the 80BAL-20WETH Balancer Pool Token into Aura it is locked permanently as veBAL, and you receive auraBAL 1:1. auraBAL is transferable and tradable, so you get veBAL-style yield without personally locking for a year. The conversion is one-way; to exit you must sell auraBAL in a secondary pool.
Locking AURA for 16 weeks gives vlAURA, which votes every two weeks on Balancer gauge emissions. Voting opens Thursdays 02:00 UTC and closes Mondays, and a gauge needs at least 0.1% of vlAURA supply to receive Aura emissions.
Both apply the same vote-locking-aggregator model, but Aura targets Balancer's veBAL (max 1-year lock) rather than Curve's veCRV (max 4-year lock). Historically Aura has controlled roughly a quarter of veBAL supply, whereas Convex has controlled a majority of veCRV.
Yes. AURA has a maximum supply of 100 million, with emissions tied to BAL earned on Aura via a declining schedule that started around 3.9 AURA per BAL and trends toward 1.4 AURA per BAL as supply grows.
